


things taught by demons

by needywitch



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Angst, Dirty Talk, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Falling In Love, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Hauntings, M/M, Mutual Pining, Paranormal, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rough Sex, Shane Madej Has a Big Dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 15:14:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 62,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20194339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/needywitch/pseuds/needywitch
Summary: Something isn't right in their new apartment and Ryan is determined to get to the bottom of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I changed some names around (since their families aren't public figures) and kept the city setting relatively vague. Aesthetically, I imagine it as being some fusion of Seattle and Sydney - since I'm Australian and don't know very much about American cities! This sat finished (and unedited) in my google docs folder for a really long time until I got up the drive to edit and post it today. I really hope that you like it! Please let me know what you think or follow me on tumblr @ needywitch !

It’s nine in the evening on friday. The night is on fire.

Music thumps heavily off the flaking paint peeling from the gyprock walls, shaking the house’s very foundations with lyrics too garbled to discern over the pounding bass that occupies every surface with greedy fervour. The night is cold and crisp, it’s cloudless and speckled with silver stars that beam down upon them under the biting arctic breeze.

The party is in full swing. Red cups are artlessly arranged on just about every surface. There’s kegs of beer scattered across the kitchen. A ping-pong table has been momentarily converted into a beer-pong table. A speaker has been mounted upon a dish-washer. A throw rug is stained with cheap vodka. A single bottle of champagne has been swept into the far corner of the wide room, surrounded by the shattered remnants of a red wine glass. People thread between rooms, line the halls in droves, and mill through the living room -- inebriated, overjoyed, celebrating the close of the semester the best way they know.

It’s a routine he’s familiar with, only -- this is the last time he’ll ever get to embrace it. Ryan is perched upon the kitchen bench, gripping the rim of a longneck VB, legs hanging freely off the edge in a fitted white v-neck, with a backwards baseball cap to hide the haphazard mess his hair has become. His jeans are faded, worn, and already stained with champagne. A pleasant flush has spread across his cheeks, and he’d lost count of his drinks the moment eight-thirty swang around to greet him.

He’d danced until his knees hurt. He’d sang until he’d been out of breath. He’d lost his friends and found them again a moment later- only to be tempted into shotgunning a beer just to show Kelsey that he _ could _. 

But, now he’s spent. The collar if his shirt is stained with beer foam, and the taste is sweet against his alcohol-numbed tongue as he knocks the bottle back for another mouthful while Eugene shoulders his way through the crowd toward him, holding the fanciest bottle of pink champagne that Ryan has ever seen. 

“One more toast, man.” He says, raising his voice enough to be heard over the thrumming music and the chattering crowd. 

Ryan offers him a clear and emphatic shake of his head. “No! You’ve given me three already. They start to lose their meaning after a while! It’s special the first time, you know, but after that it just feels cheap and easy.”

“You’re the _ definition _ of cheap and easy. This _ champagne, _ however, is _ not _ cheap _ nor _ easy.” He wiggles the cork from the spout with finesse, and tosses it aside. It bounces uselessly into the sink, rattling against the bottom of the basin. “So, you’ll indulge me, or I’ll haul you by your ankles outside to do another keg stand. Is that how you want tonight to end?”

Ryan tips his head back to laugh, eyes crinkling up at the corners as he shakes his head, covering his mouth with a hand. “No. Fuck. I gotta be lucid tomorrow.”

“What’s on tomorrow?” Eugene is nonchalant as he pours a generous amount of champagne into one of the cheap plastic cups abandoned by Ryan’s left thigh. He pauses, and tugs another toward him from where it’d been rolling about upon the benchtop. He fills that, too.

“My parents wanna celebrate, and I gotta find a new apartment.” He tips his head aside, reluctance plain upon his tone as Eugene pushes one of the plastic cups into his free hand. 

Clumsily, he accepts it. 

“You’re looking to move out? Rent off-campus is expensive, y’know.”

“I know. I gotta find a roommate.” 

Eugene’s brows lift, he steals a sip from the other plastic cup - humming at the twangy taste that answers him. 

“I may know somebody who is looking.” He says, after a moment. “What kind of person are you looking for? None of this riff-raff, right?” He flaps his free hand toward the party’s attendants. 

“I’m not picky.” He rebuffs. “Just-.. Someone who isn’t gonna host a house party where we live. That’s all I ask. No cats, either. I’m allergic.” He adds, after a moment. “Dogs are fine.”

Eugene promptly knocks back the remainder of his cup. 

“Come with me.” He says, setting it down upon the bench by Ryan’s thigh with the forgotten bottle. He reaches out to gasp onto Ryan’s wrist, and he gives it a single tug - until Ryan slips from his perch, and fumbles helplessly after him, spilling his beer down his chest in the process. It splashes across the toes of his sneakers; and the back of Eugene’s left calf- but if he notices, he doesn’t pause.

He weaves them smoothly through the crowd, and past a speaker blaring music so loudly that the floorboards shake. He drifts past Kelsey and Anna, drinking from their champagne flutes with their arms interlocked like a newleywed couple, and draws him out through the back door, and into the jutting deck - where the night lingers with its cold chill. 

The air is tinged with the heady scent of cigarette smoke and cheap weed. Ryan wrinkles the bridge of his nose in distaste at the intermingling scents, and Eugene’s steps slow as they near a small group standing off to the far side under the silver glow of one of the deck lights. 

The two folding chairs are occupied by a pair of unfamiliar girls in dusty leather jackets and a stout-looking boy who looks much too young to be at such a party. Beside him is someone much taller, someone who turns to greet Eugene with a familiar and lopsided smile the moment he draws near. 

“Hey.” His tone is clipped and short. “I come bearing gifts. This is Ryan.” He tugs Ryan closer. 

The rest of the beer sloshes onto the hemline of Ryan’s shirt-- leaving it entirely drenched and clinging loosely to his chest. A thin grimace flits across his features and he reaches over to set his now-empty beer bottle down upon the edge of a nearby table, wiping his soaked hand on his equally-damp jeans.

Then, he looks up. 

“Ryan, this is Shane.”

He’s tall, that’s the first thing Ryan notices. He’s pale, with a head of dark brown hair and a fine layer of scruff shielding his jaw to match. His eyes are dark and kind, downturned at the corners and poised over an aquiline nose that shadows his narrow smile. He’s wearing a simple pair of black chinos with a denim jacket tossed over a simple white shirt to battle the cold. He pulls a long-fingered hand from his pocket to offer to Ryan by way of greeting. 

“Made a bit of a mess of yourself.” He says, voice tinged by an accent that Ryan can’t place. “It’s nice to meet you.”

He shifts. Eugene releases him, and Ryan reaches out to accept that offered hand in a firm shake. Shane’s downturned eyes crinkle at the corners as he grins; teeth brilliant and white, even in the lambent half-dark. His hand feels warm. 

“Yeah, you too. Uh-... there’s just-... a lot going on in there.” he reasons, jerking his thumb back toward the door he’d come through. 

“The beer is my fault.” Eugene announces, swirling the liquid left within his plastic cup like some kind of wine-tasting aficionado. He turns his head to sip from it. “He normally isn’t so messy. But, you know, I think I’ve become a matchmaker.”

“How’s that?” Shane frowns.

“Ryan is looking for a roommate.”

“Oh?” Shane’s gaze drifts back to him, one slender brow perked with interest as Ryan shifts, peeling the clinging fabric from his chest with a look of distaste. He wants to tear off his shirt entirely, but that’s hardly appropriate. 

“He’s allergic to cats, though. House parties, too.”

“I’m not allergic to house parties.” Ryan counters, indignant. “Cats-... I’m allergic to cats, that part is true.” He looks back toward Shane, expression apprehensive. 

“What are your symptoms?”

“I-... my throat gets scratchy, my nose gets stuffy, my eyes sometimes swell up.”

“Like golf balls.” Eugene interjects. “I saw it once. His eyes were bloodshot for three days afterwards.”

“Yeah.” Ryan grins, ruefully. “It looked like I’d ripped the fattest blunt _ ever.” _

Shane barks out a laugh. 

It makes Ryan’s smile broaden. He feels his confidence swell just that little bit further. 

“You got any requirements for me--” he asks, and he pauses, appraising him. “--big guy?”

“The no house party rule is a good one, I might steal that.” Shane says, steepling his fingers together as he speaks. “Don’t be too messy, and for the love of all that’s good, we must have a dishwasher.”

.xx.

The apartment is spacious. It’s nestled in the heart of the city, arranged artfully within a jungle of skyscrapers as if its goal was to reach for the heavens and grasp a piece. There’s a dog park two blocks down, a gym attached to their building, and a supermarket store across the road. It’s near a train station and within a secure building that comes with two parking spaces for them; spaces neither of them possess the means to_ use _. 

The walls are simple and cream. The floor is lined with a lush and white carpet that cushions their footsteps everywhere but a single creaking floorboard in the master bedroom. There’s a balcony jutting out from the living room, overlooking the glittering city below, and an adjoining kitchen with no barrier save for a single island to separate it from the main living room. A stretch of hallway leads from it, with two doors on the left side to lead into the bedrooms. There’s a bathroom across the way, and the last door along takes them back out and into the common area of the building. 

The rent is mid-range, and manageable when split between them; so they take it.

Shane brings furnishings from his previous place, and manages to ostensibly stock their kitchen with a fridge too small for two. His microwave looks ancient and Ryan bemoans the state of his toaster. They agree to buy another between them, and it feels like a small victory. 

They turn it into theirs over time-- with a couch and coffee table purchased from IKEA for their living room, and Ryan’s flatscreen television mounted carefully upon a simple entertainment system that Shane manages to stock with a sizeable collection of novels (that are almost exclusively within the crime or horror genre, all by authors Ryan hasn’t ever heard of). It’s strange, to see the television - one Ryan had spent an inordinate amount of money upon - surrounded by more culture and more care than he thinks it ever has been before. 

They place framed pictures on the shelf above the couch, one of Ryan with his parents, one of Shane with his brother. They work together to push the pieces of their bedframes up the stairwell, and work separately to reassemble them in the comfort of their bedrooms. Ryan’s wardrobe is already sparing at best, and stashing his clothes behind the rolling doors of his wardrobe is a task that feels simpler than he had anticipated. He throws away the shirt Eugene had drenched in beer (it still smells like alcohol and cheap weed) and doesn’t think twice about it.

It takes them a week to finish moving in, and it’s only when they are done that Ryan begins to notice that something doesn’t feel quite right. 

.xx.

“Have you got siblings?” Shane asks him one morning over the chipped rim of his _ Twin Peaks _ coffee mug. 

Ryan looks up from the single slice of bread he’s lathering in peanut-butter to blink at him, blearily-- only half-present, half-awake. 

“Yeah. I got a brother.” He answers.

“Older or younger?”

“Younger.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jake.” Ryan lifts the knife to his lips to lick away the remnants of the spread, before dropping it idly into the sink. “He’s the prodigy of the family. He wants to be a dentist. He’s always wanted to be a dentist.”

Shane nods, a smile stealing across his parted lips. “Is that what makes him a prodigy? Dental school?”

Ryan nods, taking an inordinately large bite from his toast. “Mhm. In our family, it’s medical, dental or law school.” He says, mouth full. 

“...and you didn’t go to any of those schools?”

Ryan shakes his head. “I wanna be a director.” He swallows. “What about you, what’s your brother up to?”

Shane just shakes his head, swallowing another mouthful of his coffee. “Who knows. He’s married. He has kids, now. We don’t have very much in common.”

“I dunno, your noses are pretty identical.”

Shane lifts a hand to prod two fingers along the ridge of his nose. “Really?”

  


.xx.

Bonding with Shane doesn't feel difficult. In fact, it feels easy. Easier than it should. Ryan has grown used to the awkward and fumbling first few weeks of a budding and new friendship. He knows how to navigate awkward silences, knows what questions to ask and when to ask them - he knows how to read body language. He’s able to pick up on cues when it seems as though somebody might not be so willing to open up.

But, with Shane-- it feels easy. It feels as if every proverbial barrier that could exist between them has been abruptly taken down. His cautious questions are answered without a moment of hesitation. His gentle requests are acquiesced without complaint. Shane is full of smiles that spread across his thin lips as if they’re made to be there. His laughter is gentle and infectious. He’s quiet and earnest, as curious about Ryan as Ryan is about him. He wonders if it’s a byproduct of living together. He doesn’t let himself think on it for too long.

They’re crammed into a booth at a late night diner, because between their schedules, the twenty-four hour diner down the road from their apartment seems to be the only place open when they’re both ravenous at quarter to midnight. There’s a coaster between them that Shane steeples at with his long fingers, twisting it idly back and forth between them as he talks, animatedly-- a beanie pulled down over the haphazard mess that his hair has become since he’d finished moving in, eyes red-rimmed and tired-looking. He’s tucked into a rumpled button-down with a loose jean jacket cast on top; still fragrant with the scent of printer ink and worn leather from the office. 

“You’re not enjoying it, then?” Ryan asks, a faint frown pinching together between his brows as he prods his fork at the last few chips remaining upon the porcelain plate by his elbow. 

“It’s work.” Shane offers, shoulders lifting in a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe it’ll turn into something I enjoy a little more.”

“What do you actually want to do, though?” He asks, sliding the chip across the plate to collect the last few flecks of salt clinging to the white surface.

Shane watches. He’s quiet for a moment.

“A writer. Maybe. Or a teacher. I think it would be quite fun to teach history.”

“History?” Ryan’s brows lift, he pops the chip past his lips and chews. It’s cold and flavourless, but he swallows anyway. “Why history? Who gives a shit what happened in the past? Life’s about the present and all that. We don’t have time to go dwelling on the past when the _ present _ is still so fucked up.”

That smile returns to Shane’s parted lips. He looks up at Ryan, eyes alight as if amusing some private joke he doesn’t share. “Humanity will never learn from its mistakes if they aren’t studied.” He offers, simply. “Besides, I find it interesting.”

“_ Interesting _.” Ryan drops the fork.

“You didn’t enjoy history?”

“Nah. I care more about what’s going on now. I have enough to worry about _ without _ thinking about all the mistakes people who existed before us made. They made a _ lot _of them, if the thickness of my history textbook in highschool was anything to go off.”

“You took history?” Shane seems surprised. 

“Yeah. I liked, uh-... Ancient Rome.”

“Bit of a soap opera, wasn’t it?”

Ryan’s smile returns easily enough. “Yeah. I lost interest after they all stabbed Ceasar though.”

Shane draws back, a single chuckle shaking his wiry frame. “Aggripina the Younger was one of my favourites.”

“What’d she do?”

“She was Emperor Nero’s mother. He had her exiled and tried to have her killed. She survived a drowning. The actual events of her death are heavily contradictory and increasingly sensational. Nobody knows for sure how she died. She’s a serial killer, though. She killed ten men.”

Ryan is silent for a moment, peering thoughtfully across the narrow table at Shane. 

“You were a big nerd in highschool, weren’t you?”

Shane leans back, clapping a palm to his chest, and closing his eyes as he laughs - eyes crinkling at the corners, lips pulling upwards into a narrow but nevertheless sincere smile. 

“That’s what you take from that?”

“Yeah. I can just imagine it. You, sitting in the front row with two of your nerd friends, lifting your hand to answer every question. Teacher, teacher, pick me!” He lifts his hand, straining in imitation of a highschool Shane, sniffling and wiggling his fingers. 

“Well, you’re wrong about one thing.”

Ryan drops his hand, leaning back with a conspiratorial tilt of his head. “What’s that?”

“I didn’t have any friends.”

.xx.

They settle into a routine before they know it, before either one of them intends to. Ryan leaves for work at six in the morning. He walks down the road to the cafe, dons his apron, and runs his fingers raw brewing coffee until three in the afternoon. He walks home, naps on the couch, and wakes up when Shane gets back to the office at six. They watch re-runs of old TV shows they’ve seen a dozen times on Ryan’s flatscreen, until eventually they are both too hungry to focus. 

Sometimes they’ll cook. Other times, they’ll order in. Shane is deceptively talented in the kitchen, and before long -- they’ve arranged a deal. Ryan buys groceries, and Shane cooks for them both. 

It becomes relaxing; lying stretched out on the couch by the island separating the living room from the kitchen, listening to the sounds of steel scraping on chopping boards, slicing vegetables, nudging meats onto sizzling pans, and Shane -- humming pleasantly amongst the fragrant scents drifting from the cooktop. 

Once he’s finished cooking, he brings two plates out from the kitchen to set upon the coffee table where they eat - with Ryan sitting cross-legged upon the floor in front of the table, and Shane perched upon the very edge of the couch beside him, while both of them swear to purchase a proper dining table the next time they are paid. 

They’ve made this deal four times already. 

Like every night, Shane turns to him - eyes filled with questions and burgeoning curiosity, fork poised over another strange query that Ryan braces himself for this time. 

“Where are your parents?” It’s asked cautiously; and Ryan hesitates. 

He looks up at the television, only half-registering to the sloppy sitcom illuminating the vegetables upon his plate as he considers the best way to approach the subject. He pushes a small floret of cauliflower toward the edge of the bowl. 

“Uh. You mean my mum?”

Shane pauses. 

“Both of them.”

“Well.” Ryan clears his throat, faintly. His heart offers an unpleasant twist. His stomach turns. His appetite dwindles as he frowns down at the food in front of him that still smells wonderful. 

“My dad’s dead. Mum lives just out of state.”

“Oh.” Shane’s voice softens. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, dude.” He adds, hastily - spearing that floret. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Shane’s voice is quiet, it’s hesitant. Even without looking up, Ryan can feel his eyes upon him, boring into his profile.

“It’s-... still kinda recent, y’know?”

“Then, no. That’s all right.” Shane shakes his head, gently lowering his knife to the table to reach out with his newly-freed hand to settle a reassuring palm upon Ryan’s shoulder. Warmth seeps in through the fitted cotton layer between them. He feels warm. 

“If you change your mind, you know. I’m here.” 

That hand withdraws. 

“What about your parents?” Ryan asks, unwilling to dwell on it. He shovels a forkful of food into his mouth just for something to _ do _ with his hands and it feels like chewing on carpet.

“They’re in Chicago.” Shane answers, easily. “I visit them plenty often. They’re good people. There aren’t many of those around, you know.”

“I know.” Ryan says, mouth full of food. “When are you gonna go back next?”

“Likely in a few months.” Shane’s foot shifts, and he bumps Ryan’s thigh lightly with a sock-enclosed toe. “Don’t talk with your mouth full. That’s rude.” 

.xx.

There are days where something doesn’t feel quite right in the apartment. 

It’s two-thirty in the morning on a Thursday. Rain taps idle fingers against Ryan’s window, reflecting dulled and warped moonlight off the mirror built into his wardrobe on the opposite wall, faintly illuminating the rumpled clothes strewn across his floor, and the alarm clock on his nightstand, displaying the time in deep-red letters, as if to remind him that he ought to be asleep.

It’s a strange and oppressive feeling. It feels as though the air is too thick to inhale. As if a window has been left open, and cold air has been allowed in to whisk its ghostly fingers across Ryan’s flesh, shifting with a breeze that doesn’t exist. It’s a strange and foreboding chill that lingers just out of reach, the fault of an ephemeral presence that Ryan can’t place. 

He sits up, bedsheets pooling within his lap as he turns his cautious gaze toward the wardrobe, where he peers at his reflection in the misty glass. He’s a silhouette in the half-dark, back illuminated by the blue-hued glow of the moonlight outside, dazzled by streetlamps and the rush of passing traffic some distance below them. 

Dazedly, his gaze draws upwards; toward the plain ceiling and the flaking paint in the far left corner of the room that he had initially thought to be a cobweb until he’d tried to whisk it down. 

His attention strays to his closed bedroom door, and then to the floorboards, lit faintly by the light in the bathroom in a single and narrow shaft of light peeking in under the door, cut into two by a shadow. 

A frown settles upon his brow, and thoughtlessly - he curls a hand within his bedsheets to tug them back from his legs. He eases off the edge of his bed, and ventures quietly forwards. One of the floorboards creaks under his feet, and the polished wood feels ice cold against the soles of his bare feet. He looks up, and he reaches out with a hand to curl his careful fingers around the brass doorknob. 

He gives it a single twist, and smoothly eases the door open.

The bathroom is flanked by golden light; all white porcelain and reflective surfaces that hurt his eyes as they struggle to adjust to the intrusion of light-- but there’s nobody there. 

Ryan leans forwards, he peers down the hallway -- towards Shane’s room where the door remains half-open, offering him a mere glimpse into the room beyond, bathed in darkness. 

“Shane?” He whispers, voice hissed.

There’s no answer. 

He inches the door open wider, and steps out and into the hallway. He moves toward their livingroom, and switches on the light; squinting against the obtrusive white light as it burns at his retinas. 

There’s nobody there, either. 

Shaking his head, Ryan turns off the light. He runs a hand through his hair, and starts back toward his room. 

“Imagining things.” He mutters, moving back inside, and closing the door. 

He pauses by his bed to look back toward the bottom of his door. 

The golden glow cast by the bathroom light still slithers in beneath, a single shaft of light - uninterrupted. 

If there had been something there before, it’s gone now. 

.xx.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” He asks it almost like it’s a challenge, seated upon one of the stools in front of their kitchen island on a Sunday morning, hunched over a single mug of black coffee while Shane lingers by the toaster, rumpled and tired-eyed, waiting for his breakfast to finish crisping. 

“What?” He asks, voice gravelly with exhaustion. 

“Y’know. Ghosts. Do you think they’re real?”

Shane watches him. His gaze is hazy, half-lidded, deadpan. He blinks. He looks back to the toaster. “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“What? What’s the problem, it’s totally within the realm of possibility.” 

Shane lifts a large hand to cover one side of his face, muffling a groan into his palm. “No it’s not, Ryan.”

“How do _ you _ know?” Ryan levels at him, leaning forwards. 

“Science exists. That’s how I know.” He leans forwards to peer into the toaster, as if to ensure his bread isn’t on the verge of burning. “Why are you asking me this nonsense anyway?”

“I think I saw something last night.”

Shane blinks again. He leans away from the toaster, and slowly turns his flat-eyed stare upon Ryan. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw something.” Ryan looks down at his coffee, feeling suddenly self-conscious under Shane’s scrutinizing gaze. “The dark spooks me just a bit, so I left the bathroom light on--...”

“Oh.” Shane screws his eyes shut, a pained expression contorting his features. “Our electricity bill is going to skyrocket. If you want something frightening, just wait for that to come in. Please don’t leave it on again.”

“I’m gonna do it every night, dude.”

“Why?” 

“I need some light. Complete darkness freaks me out!”

“Then we’ll get you a fucking night-light.” Shane offers, flatly. 

Ryan sits up, indignant. “I’m not a child!”

“Then learn to sleep in the dark, y’know-- like an adult!” Shane rebuffs. 

“This is-- we’re getting off topic!”

“Great! I don’t wanna talk about ghosts!” 

His toast pops, as if to puncture his words. Shane busies himself by fishing a chopping board from the cabinet, and daintily dropping the two slices of bread fresh out of the toaster upon it. 

“Some of the light from the bathroom comes in under my door.” Ryan starts, speaking in a rush before Shane can interrupt him. “I saw a shadow there, like something was standing in the hallway between my room and the bathroom.” 

He turns with the chopping board in his grasp to place it upon the bench between he and Ryan. 

“Marmalade?” 

“Nah, dude. Peanut butter or bust.”

Shane smirks, and turns sleepily back toward the pantry to fish through their dwindling supply of spreads. 

“So, your logical conclusion to that is that it was a ghost?” He asks, returning with the jar of peanut butter in his hand, clasped beneath long fingers against the heel of his palm. 

“Well, I mean-... I got up to look. I opened the door, my first thought was that somebody had broken in, or maybe you were just being weird. But, there wasn’t anybody there. I checked the living room as well, and I didn’t see anything. So, I went back into my room and I shut the door. When I looked down, the shadow was gone.”

Shane withdraws two knives from within their cutlery tray, expression awash with disinterest, as if he’s only half listening to what Ryan has to say. 

“What else could that be if it isn’t a ghost?”

“Oh, I don’t know Ryan.” Shane mutters, twisting the lid from the jar and dipping his knife in for a liberal dollop. “Your imagination?”

“I wasn’t imagining it.” Ryan counters, coolly.

“It could’ve been something like sleep paralysis. The subconscious plays all kinds of funny tricks on the mind when it takes over.”

“I wasn’t paralyzed. I wasn’t even asleep.” Ryan’s words are uttered past gritted teeth. “I saw it.”

“I believe that you _ think _ you saw something, don’t get me wrong.” Shane sets about spreading the peanut butter over one of the slices of toast. It’s sweet fragrance fills the space between them, cutting through the bitter perfume of Ryan’s coffee with ease. “I just don’t think it was a ghost.”

“You think I’m nuts, then?”

“I didn’t say that.” Shane pushes the slice of toast towards him, and sets about lathering the second. 

“Well, that’s what you’re insinuating. I imagined it. I made it up.”

“I didn’t say that, either.” 

“Whatever, dude.”

Ryan reaches out to grasp the handle of his coffee cup. He snatches the slice of toast, and slips from his stool to cut across the living room onto their balcony where he sits to have his breakfast instead. 

He steals a single glance over his shoulder and back into the apartment. 

Shane is still standing in the kitchen, one hand braced against the island, while his other holds the slice of toast aloft as he chews; looking exasperated, looking tired. Looking worn. 

.xx.

When he returns to the apartment at seven in the evening, it’s empty. 

Part of him is relieved. Another part is awash with anxiety; eager to square away his squabble with Shane. He’d been distracted for the majority of the day, unable to feign interest in his friends and their conversations while his mind kept wandering to where Shane could be, what Shane could be doing, if Shane might hate him. 

His heart had sunk at the mere thought, and - glumly - Ryan drifts back towards his room, slipping his jacket from his shoulders as he skirts through the doorway, and moves instinctively for his bed. 

But, he stops himself short.

Nestled there, resting upon freshly-made sheets in glossy plastic packaging, is a nightlight. 

It’s shaped distinctly like a rabbit, with two large ears and a smiling face. Its eyes are closed, and its whiskers are folded back in a look of drowsy ease. Stuck to the top of its packaging on a simple yellow post-it, is a note. 

Ryan reaches out to peel it free. There are only two words written there in an elegantly looping script he knows must belong to Shane.

_ I’m sorry. _

A smile draws across Ryan’s too-full lips. Despite himself, he _ laughs. _

“Fuck you, big guy.” 

.xx.

For as long as Ryan can remember, he has always been afraid of the dark. 

It manifests insignificantly. He gets up at night to hurry to the bathroom quickly, in the odd event that a foreign hand may reach out from beneath his bed to snatch his ankle. He eases the sliding door of his wardrobe closed before turning off his light because the unknown blackness beyond serves as a vacant portion of space for his imagination to paint one too many possibilities upon. He listens to white noise filtering through the speakers of his phone so that he isn’t listening to silence. He feels safer, more comfortable when there’s somebody else present in the room, sleeping with him. Being alone in his parents’ house - when he had lived there - had been a struggle for him. He’d check and re-check the doors. Lock and re-lock the windows; just in case, _ just in case. _ He’s seen too many horror films, he’s read too many horror novels. He’s immersed himself in too many conspiracy theories. He’s heard every urban legend in the book. 

Jake tells him he knows too much. Ryan prefers to view it as living life practically. 

Even while practicing every ritual he knows (ensuring his windows are closed and latched, double-checking the deadlock on their apartment’s front door, sliding the simple latch into place upon his own bedroom door), it’s still a struggle to sleep, at times. 

He’s never been one to put much weight in the idea of homes and rooms having ‘energies’. He’s never entered a room and felt _ strange. _ He’s never walked into a home and felt as though something present there wanted him to leave. 

Not until now. 

He’s lying upon his bed flat on his back, staring up at the single flaking curl of paint in the far right corner of his bedroom. His breath tumbles from his lips in plumes of pale vapour, outlined by the pale moonlight filtering in through the slats of the window opposite the foot of his bed. It’s cold, even with warmth creeping in from the double-barred heater. He can see the outline of his reflection in the mirror beside his bed, out of the very corner of his eye -- and something is wrong.

It feels as though a weight is perched upon his chest. It is suffocating and obtrusive. It’s settled below the hinges of his collarbones, above the cusp of his sternum. It’s sitting upon the cage of his ribs as if it belongs there, and he can hardly breathe. His limbs feel as though they are made from lead, as though they are tangled too tightly within his bedsheets to fumble free. They aren’t listening to the signals his brain is sending. They aren’t moving, no matter how desperately he tries to wriggle his fingers, or bend his elbows. All he manages is a small and subtle twitch of his fingertips. 

It isn’t a feeling Ryan is familiar with. He’s had many, many nightmares before; but none that slithered through the gaps of his subconscious to bleed into his reality. There’s always been a fine line between the two. He’s never had to struggle to differentiate reality from fantasy; not until now. He feels as though he’s lying at the crossroads between his conscious and subconscious selves- this strange and unfamiliar purgatory that doesn’t want his presence. 

A cold and unfamiliar panic begins to trickle into his bloodstream. It spirals outwards from the core of his chest, from the heart of that awful weight. It expands within him, spurred on by the wild race of his heart. It unfurls its steady limbs within him, pushing past his defenses until he feels half-blind with fear. His breath shudders past his lips. The beat of his heart rings wild between his ears. The strange and unrelenting feeling that he’s in _ danger _ persists. He parts his lips, and he tries to _ scream. _ He tries to call out for help, to shout, to writhe free, to _ scream for Shane. _ But not a sound leaves him.

His voice is caught in his throat, tangled up with everything else, drowned by fear, deadened by panic. His mouth gapes open and snaps shut. He squeezes his eyes shut, and pries them open again. Dread seethes around him. It curls its fumbling fingers around him and threatens to pull him under. It tells him that something is coming, something is coming, something is coming and it’s _ evil. _

Ryan’s fingers flex, they pull into fists against his tangled bedsheets, and whatever had been holding him captive abruptly recedes. 

He jerks upright, springing forwards to sit up with a wild gasp. He pulls in a lungful of air, swallowing down a scream, squeezing his eyes shut as he pushes at his sheets to pry them free of his frame as he scrambles back. His skin is slick with sweat and his palms slide against the folds of his bedsheets. He lands, clumsily, upon his pillow. He draws his eyes open--

There’s a figure standing there. 

It’s at the foot of his bed. It’s tall. It’s thin. It has arms too long to be human. It has a head too large to be _ real. _ It is a silhouette in the moonlight, tinged blue at the edges. A shadow, a spectre, a figment. It is reaching for him with a long-fingered grip that bleeds _ hunger. _

“No--no!” He scrambles for his pillows, and his phone falls into his palm. He struggles with its screen, swiping the toolkit upwards as its flourescent light illuminates his features; a pinprick of light out of the peripheral of his vision, reflected back at him through his mirror. He turns on the light. It floods the room with a tinny blue glow. 

Ryan shines it on that figure with a newfound surge of blustering courage. 

...but there’s nobody there.

“What--..?” 

His light dapples over the chest of drawers beneath his window, artfully arranged with his favourite Marvel figurines and a single photo of his family. He shines the light back and forth, carefully; as if waiting for that figure to spring from the shadows and close its elongated fingers around the base of his throat. 

His room is exactly as he had left it before collapsing into bed. His clothes are still rumpled in a small puddle by the edge of his bed. His shoes are still toppled over against the throw rug. His bath towel is still sitting on the floor by his door. 

His breaths come in heaving pulls. His heart is racing. His skin feels ice cold. His hands are trembling. The light shudders as he moves it back toward the mirror, and sees only himself reflected there, washed out and near-indistinguishable amidst a tepid blue glow.

With a quiet sigh of defeat, Ryan drops his phone back onto his duvet. He lifts his hands and he wipes them, tiredly, over the backs of his eyelids. He skims his fingers through his hair, he wipes the sweat from his brow, and peels his shirt from his chest. His head resounds with a dull and vacant _ ache. _

“Fuck.” 

.xx.

He wakes up to the trundling groan of their coffee machine, rattling through the brightly-lit kitchen early on Monday morning. 

Light falls carelessly across the backs of his eyelids. It warms the toes of his feet, folded against a shaft of sunlight peeking in through the broad balcony windows, radiating and reassuring. Blearily, Ryan blinks awake - running a tired hand across the backs of his eyelids as he muffles a quiet groan. 

That ache behind his eyes persists, stubborn and impatient. He doesn’t want to open his eyes again. 

“Somebody kick you out of bed?” 

Shane’s voice is gentle, probing, roughened from sleep.

“Mmm. No.” Ryan responds, grimacing at how gravelly he sounds. “Had a nightmare or-... somethin’.”

“Or something?” Shane asks, over the queasy puffs of their coffee machine’s last pump of liquid. 

“Dunno what it was.”

“Was it a ghost again?” 

Ryan can _ hear _ the grin in his voice. Were his eyes open, he’d roll them somewhat emphatically. Instead, he simply drags himself upright to sit, perched upon the edge of one of the couch seats, with his elbows resting upon his parted knees, and his head hung low before himself. 

“I think so.” He answers. “...-but I also know you think this stuff is bullshit.” 

His languid gaze draws upwards. He turns to look toward Shane, shutting his left eye to bring his figure into focus as he leans against the kitchen island in a simple white crew neck and his low-strung pajama trousers. He looks-... more awake than Ryan has ever seen him. His eyes are bright, and Ryan wonders if the steaming mug of coffee held aloft in his left hand has something to do with it. Shane always brightens considerably after he’s had his morning coffee. There’s something different, though. Ryan can’t place it. 

“Can you get me some?” He asks, lifting a hand to gesture, idly, to the coffee in Shane’s hand.

He hesitates, and then he nods; setting the ceramic mug down upon the island to turn back for the cabinets to fish out a second, along with a coffee pod. 

“Did you use your night light?” He asks. “I got it to help alleviate your fears, you know.”

“I’m not gonna use it. I’m not a fucking toddler, dude.” 

“I know you’re not.” He drops the pod into the machine, and presses the lever down, his back to Ryan. “Sometimes adults need safety nets, too. That’s all.”

“It’s not a safety net. It’s mockery. You’re mocking me.” 

“I’m not! I’m concerned about you. That’s quite different.” The machine trundles and groans. Ryan fears it might just be on its last legs, but it pulls through. It is nothing if not efficient when they need it most. 

“I haven’t even opened it.”

“Well, Ryan, what do you expect, honestly? Ghosts are scared of artificial light, everybody knows that.”

“Now you’re just taking the piss.” Ryan buries his face back into his hands. 

He can hear Shane’s footsteps navigating the cold tiles as he retrieves his coffee mug. He feels the couch shift as he sits beside Ryan upon it, and hears the dull _ thud _ of his mug settling upon the coffee table in front of him. He smells the permissive fragrance of it, coiled with sweet promise. 

“No. Not this time.” Shane pauses, and when he speaks again - there’s a hint of genuine curiosity to his careful words. “What did you see this time?” 

Ryan’s fingers shift back, and sweep down his cheeks to perch under his chin, navigating through the slow scrape of his morning stubble. He must be a sight, he knows-- with his hair as wild as it must be, in need of a shave, in a stained shirt and a pair of sweats with far too many holes. He looks over at Shane, who watches him through the steam swirling from the surface of his fresh coffee as he brings it to his lips for a small sip. 

“I dunno. Why d’you even care? It’s shit you don’t even believe is real.” He reaches out for the other mug. He curls his fingers around it, grateful for its warmth. 

“It frightened you enough to come out here to sleep.” Shane points out, plainly. “I’ve had strange dreams before as well, you know. You’re not unique in that experience. They scare me, sometimes. When I was little, I used to creep into bed with my brother when I had a bad dream.” 

“Really?” Ryan arches a skeptical brow. 

“Yes. It made me feel brave.” Shane admits, offering a placid half-shrug. “Now, what did _ you _ see?” He asks, again. 

Ryan lets out a drawn-out sigh. He blinks down at the carmel-coloured surface of his coffee, scattered with stray foam-bubbles. 

“I dunno, man. It wasn’t like any dream I’ve had before.”

“Do you have recurrent dreams?”

“No. Not really. This just-... it didn’t feel like a dream, y’know?” He draws a hand free from his coffee mug, and he presses his palm to his sternum in mimicry of that strange and ephemeral weight that had perched upon him just a few hours ago. “I couldn’t move. I was awake, but I couldn’t _ move. _ My arms weren’t listening to me. I could _ see, _ but I couldn’t-... couldn’t scream, couldn’t call for help, couldn’t call for you--”

“--you tried calling for me?” He sounds surprised. 

Ryan doesn’t look up. 

“..--I thought someone had broken in, or something. ‘Cause, you know, I want to think that you’re right. Shit like this doesn’t happen to people. Ghosts aren’t real. This stuff is nonsense. Right? But, I couldn’t move, dude. I was like-... pinned to the bed.”

There is another pause. Shane takes a long sip of his coffee. 

“I think I was right after all. I think you experienced sleep paralysis.”

“Dude, what?” Ryan turns to look at him, brows drawn together into a shallow frown. 

“It’s quite common, you know. It’s happened to me before.”

“But-... when I sat up, I saw something. There was somebody standing at the foot of my bed. It was this-... this figure, it was tall, and dark. It was reaching out for me. It was _ hungry.” _

Shane looks at him for a long moment. 

“It’s quite commonplace for people to see things when they experience sleep paralysis. It’s dreams intermingling with reality. Some people see nothing, others see entities. There’s documentaries about it--”

“I don’t give a _ shit _ what people make documentaries about! I saw something there. I _ know _ what I saw. It pisses me off when you do this, y’know. Discount what I saw because it doesn't match up with _ your _ version of reality.” He waves a flippant hand as he speaks, and ignores how Shane reaches out to steady his hand holding his mug of coffee. 

“What would you rather me say? Do you want me to validate your fears? What are you implying here, Ryan?”

“I don’t--”

“That our apartment is haunted, is that it?”

“Maybe it is! We dunno what happened here before we moved in! Maybe somebody got murdered! Maybe that’s why the fucking lease was so cheap!”

“Ryan-- do you hear yourself?”

He lets out a frustrated exhale, and he leans forwards to set his coffee back upon the table in front of him. 

“I know what I saw, dude. I saw something the other night, too. There’s something wrong with this place. I’ve never had sleep paralysis before. I’ve never seen entities in my room before. I’ve never felt-... like I don’t belong somewhere before. Are you really not feeling _ anything?” _

“I’m feeling quite energetic this morning, yes.”

“Say it.” Ryan urges, quietly; sincerely. “This apartment might be haunted.” 

Shane’s lips purse.

“I’m going to need definitive proof before I believe that it may be haunted.” 

His words are enragingly measured, frustratingly even, infuriatingly level. 

So, Ryan responds in the same tone. 

“Fuck you.”

Shane breathes out a quiet laugh, shaking his head with a bemused grin sprawled across his parted lips. 

“I’ll put it this way.” He says, offering a hand toward Ryan, long fingers splayed apart in a show of surrender. “I believe that _ you _ believe that you experienced something. I just happen to believe that… this something was sleep paralysis, and exhaustion. If this apartment is haunted, I need to see it with my own eyes before I will believe it. So far, the only thing I have experienced are eerily quiet neighbours and a very drafty bathroom. We really ought to speak with the landlord about that. What’s his name again?”

“Reggie.” 

“Yes! Reggie.” He pauses, peering at Ryan’s harrowed, pale features. “...-we can switch rooms, if that’s the problem, Ryan.” He offers, quietly, sincerely. 

“Nah. It ain’t the room. I’m sure of that.” He reaches for his coffee again; for-- despite himself, despite what he’d ever admit, Shane’s level-headed denial and (perfectly rational) explanation for his experience, has placated him somewhat. “I’m gonna get you that fucking proof, big guy.”

Shane’s grin returns. It’s illuminated with fondness, with early-morning charm. “I’m on the edge of my seat, Ryan.”

He peers at him again, watching as he swallows down another mouthful of coffee; how the slender column of his pale throat shifts with it, as the corners of his eyes dance with lingering amusement at Ryan’s predicament. His hair is artfully dishevelled. His glasses sit perched upon the bridge of his aquiline nose, speckled with faint freckles Ryan can only see now-- sitting this close to him. He smells of sandalwood and mint, intermingled with the gentle perfume of fresh coffee, a scent Ryan is gradually beginning to associate with slow and hazy mornings like this.

He realises what it is after a moment-- the subtle shadows that sit under Shane’s eyes are gone. The faint lilac rings that hint at veiled restlessness, sleepless nights, or a little too much stress. He looks, for once, as though he’d slept the night through.

“Why do you look so good this morning? Did you get a face mask or something? A collagen lift?” He asks, peering skeptically at the other man.

“Wh--? Oh-!” Shane lifts a hand to skim the flat cusps of his fingertips across the crest of his cheek as he lets out a sheepish laugh. “..-I got a good night of sleep for once. It’s quiet here, and it took me a long time to adjust. I’m used to hearing traffic at all hours, but we’re up so high here that I hear nothing.”

“You should try listening to white noise.” Ryan says, knocking back his coffee in three large gulps. “I listen to forest sounds when I wanna sleep. Like, bugs and rain and shit.”

“Forest sounds?” Shane almost sounds… surprised. “Really?”

“Mmhm. Anyway.” He sets down his now-empty mug. His tongue prickles, burnt from the too-hot coffee. “I gotta shower. My shift starts soon.”

“Oh-.. okay. I’ll text you with dinner ingredients.” Shane calls after him. 

Ryan lifts a hand. “You got it, big guy.”

.xx.

“Are you stressed?” Andrew asks him as the last of the morning rush begins to trickle out of the cafe. Workers equipped with bagels and coffee filter out and back into the burning rush of the city street; beyond the warm embrace of their rustic, quaint little cafe with its exposed brick walls, and shanty wooden rafters. 

The counter is a quaint affair, with a small booth full of pastries, and their daily specials written upon its surface in white paint marker, punctured by Andrew’s characteristic flourish. They’re both in plain white button downs paired with aprons cast carelessly over the top to save their clothing from the threatening spray of roasting coffee beans and curdled milk. 

“What’s that got to do with it?” Ryan asks, leaning against the counter by their espresso machine, his fingertips already sore from roasting. 

“I’ve heard that’s what causes sleep paralysis. When people are stressed out or depressed, it makes it worse. That, and sleeping on your back.” He adds, voice flat but emphatic, roughened by the deep cadence of his voice. 

Ryan pauses to consider it, skimming idle fingers against the stubble along his jawline while Andrew shuffles a new sleeve of paper cups out of their wrapped plastic casing. 

“I mean. I guess I have been stressed.”

“You experienced loss.” Andrew points out, flatly. “You moved away from home for the first time. That would make anybody stressed.”

“I’m twenty-seven.” Ryan reminds him, blandly. “Moving away from my mum shouldn’t make me stressed out.”

“Yeah, but-... you lost somebody. Your mum was going through a rough time, too. You had to leave her. Well, not _ leave her, _ leave her-- but-... you know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” Ryan cuts in, reluctant to continue that thread of conversation. His wounds feel too raw, too real, too present to discuss so candidly. Even with Andrew. “I mean, I guess. It just felt so real, that’s all.”

“Have you ever felt like your mum’s place was haunted?” Andrew asks, setting about balancing the cups carefully on top of the machine, within easy reach. 

“Hers? Nah. She’s got at least one crucifix and one portrait of Jesus in every room, dude. Any demon or ghost would take one look at that place and go running for the hills.”

“Maybe you should borrow some of her-... y’know-... her Jesus merch.”

“Merch?” Ryan’s brows draw up, he fumbles over a laugh. 

“Yeah.” Andrew turns to glance at him over his shoulder, grinning despite himself. “I don’t know what people call it. Catholic stuff, you know. Maybe that’ll deter whatever it is. Or, you could try to communicate with it.”

“Won’t that just make it worse?”

“It might. But, you could also learn something. I’ve heard about friendly ghosts before. It could be one of those.”

“It didn’t seem very friendly.”

“Well, how will you know unless you reach out to it?”

“How would I even do that, dude?” Ryan asks, running his splayed fingers through his wild curls, tired. 

“You could get a ouija board.” Andrew suggests, drawing back as an arctic blast from the street beyond drifts toward them as the cafe door pushes open for another customer. He drifts for the counter, shrugging at Ryan. “You’ll never know if you don’t give it a try.”

He turns his winning smile toward the newly-arrived elderly woman requesting a muffin while Ryan considers his words. 

His resolve is warmed by the espresso machine.

.xx.

It feels as foolish as the rabbit-shaped night light. 

Despite Ryan knowing that, despite him repeating it to himself with every step he takes outside the cafe once it closes on a breezy Wednesday afternoon, he still finds himself standing outside a boardgame store on the street corner. 

Its glass display is illuminated by a blue neon sign that reads _ ‘MR. FLUFFY’S GAME SHOP’. _ The shelves are cluttered by countless games Ryan recognises; he spots various iterations of Monopoly, Clue, Guess Who, Boggle, Call of Cthulhu-- even a set of polyhedral dice that glitter under the flickering blue light. He sees his reflection against the back of a Snakes and Ladders box, features distorted by the curve of the glass display, deeply conflicted.

His hands are balled up into fists stuffed deep within his pockets. The biting wind is cold and sharp as it drifts past him. Strangers pass him by, trudging against the cold, nameless and insignificant against the grey burn of the city behind him as he struggles in silence. 

It feels strangely ironic that something as clandestine as a ouija board could be found so ubiquitously; on a street corner, in a part of the city that Ryan visits on a near daily basis, sandwiched between Mouse Trap and Uno. He sighs, he shakes his head, he shoves his worries over what Shane would think of him, and he shoulders into the store. 

Its customers are primarily parents alongside their children, mulling over which version of Monopoly their friends would enjoy most. He sees some adults crowded together over a metal dice display, practice rolling a D20 on a small velvet tray. He avoids all of them as he drifts along the cluttered aisles. His steps slow to a halt as he spots the small, somewhat dusty range of ouija boards. 

He reaches out, and snatches up the first (and cheapest) one that he finds. He holds it close to his chest as he hurries to the counter, and pays in silence-- ignoring the way the cashier's brows lift at the sight of it. 

.xx.

“I got you something.”

Ryan looks up, surprised. 

He’s sprawled out on their couch with one leg hanging over the edge and his other tucked beneath him. He’s in a simple pair of grey sweatpants and a plain white shirt that has ridden up toward the dip of his bellybutton where he sits. His hair is sleep-churned and haphazard atop his head, and the luminescent glow of his phone screen illuminates his features. 

It’s grey and raining outside. The light that shines in through their balcony doors is grey and hazy; softened by the gentle reach of dusk, smoothing the sharp angles of Shane’s veiled features. A five o’clock shadow covers his jaw. His hair is as messy as Ryan’s. He’s in the same black button-down he wears to work every day, and a pair of blue chinos. There’s a plain white plastic bag in his left hand, held outward for Ryan like an offering.

“For me?” He asks, lifting his brows in disbelief as he cranes his head to look over at Shane. 

Wordlessly, he nods. 

“Is-... this is a joke, right?” Ryan struggles upright to prop himself up on one hand. 

Shane blinks. He frowns. “No. Why would I do that?” 

“I dunno, to take the piss?”

“No.” Shane shakes his head, and takes a cautious step forwards; feet clad in plain white socks that make no sound against the carpet beneath him. “I think I’ve done enough piss-taking for now. I wanted to apologise for it.”

“Oh, so now you’re trying to buy my affection, huh?” Ryan grins, and holds out a hand, tossing his phone onto the coffee table with the other.

There’s a moment of hesitation before Shane extends his hand to slip the bag into Ryan’s grip. The moment his hands are free, they disappear deep into his pockets. He drops his gaze to his feet, shuffling where he stands as if uncertain of what to _ do. _

Ryan watches him for a brief moment. He frowns. He bites back the teasing remark that flies forwards to perch upon the tip of his tongue, and he sets the bag in his lap. 

It’s heavy.

He peels back the plastic with careful fingers, drawing it back with care. A warning label answers his questioning gaze, and his frown deepens as he shifts the box over until he can plainly see what is inside. 

It’s a camera.

A Canon DSLR camera with a flip-up viewfinder and an adjustable lens. Ryan’s eyes go wide. He feels his mouth drop open. His heart lurches into his throat. Disbelief flitters through him, soon replaced by sheer excitement, and immense _ joy. _

“Shane-- you didn’t--!”

“I-..” He coughs, stuttering as Ryan fumbles with the cardboard flaps, prying the box open. “..--you know, you said you wanted to be a director and all of that, so I just thought that it could be useful. I’m also getting really tired of hearing all these ghost stories and I’d like to see some of them for myself. It has night-vision, so I thought you could catch those moments on film the next time you see them, you know, for posterity.”

There’s a camera in there, nestled amidst a bed of styrofoam to keep it from harm. It’s expensive, durable, and _ unbelievable. _

“Dude--- this is fucking insane!”

“Do you-... do you like it?”

“Of course I do!” Ryan moves the box onto the coffee table. He scrambles to his feet, features drawn into an _ impossibly _ wide smile, eyes crinkled at the corners with it. He crosses the room towards Shane, and he lifts his arms forwards. He wraps them, tightly, around the taller man’s waist, and he pulls him in close for an embrace. 

Shane’s breath is forced from his lungs. He lets out a disbelieving laugh as Ryan’s head settles against his chest. 

There is hesitation, again. Ryan feels it. But, he’s too elated to care. 

Shane’s arms envelope him. They wind about his shoulders, the most comfortable part of him that he can reach, and he tries to ignore the warmth seeping from where Shane’s thumb touches the skin at the nape of his neck. 

“Are you sure?” He asks, without releasing him. “Those are fucking expensive, dude. I’ve been saving up for one since highschool.”

“Have you? I mean-... yes, they aren’t cheap. It was on sale. I didn’t think anything of it.” 

“Shit kept coming up, bills and fees, and then my dad-...” His words catch at the back of his throat. A dull ache resounds in his chest. He’s pulled at the corners of a wound that’s barely had time to close. He clears his throat. He realises he’s still holding onto Shane, and slowly - he detaches himself. He moves on before Shane has the chance to question him. “...-I just kept having to put it off.”

He sees him nod. He sees him lift an impossibly long arm to hook his fingers against the nape of his neck as he averts his gaze again, like he had when he’d first deposited the gift into Ryan’s hands. 

“My salary is decent.” Shane reasons. “..and you’ve put up with me for this long already. It’s more than I expected from any roommate.” 

“Dude.” Ryan looks up, smile crooked, but nevertheless broad. “You make it sound like you’re a nightmare. It’s been a breeze.” He drifts back toward the couch to perch upon the edge of the seat as he sets about taking the camera from its box. 

“Even with the ‘ghost’?”

“If I get that shit on camera? Hell yeah.” 

.xx.

It’s three minutes past midnight, and Ryan is wide awake. He’s sitting in the middle of his bed with his laptop open before him, propped up on his spare pillow. The lights are out in his room, and only the glow from his screen illuminates the space. Moonlight blotted by the clouds blanketing the city skyline outside shines in through the slats of his window, with the speckled spots of the city below offering distant pinpricks of light that shimmer and wink at him where he sits, engrossed in his search. 

He’d been curious since the moment he saw the camera. He’s far from up to date on the latest and best cameras on the market (though he used to be, long before the pain of loss clouded his judgement, his emotions, and his outlook for the future). But, he knew the one now in his possession would’ve come at a cost. 

It sits by his left thigh, free of its box, with its lens and shoulder-strap attached. He’d tried it out, he’d taken a few photos of Shane while he’d cooked their dinner. He’d snapped some photos about the apartment, testing - trying the automatic focus, surprising himself by how intuitive it turned out to be to use. It felt effortless, like an extension of himself. It opened up a world of possibilities, and already - Ryan is set on taking it to work with him in the morning to take some videos of Andrew brewing coffee. Not because he wanted to do anything with them, just because he wanted to practice, he wanted to _ see. _

He’s scrolling idly through pages on Canon’s website, trying to find the camera that’s _ his. _ The prices gradually crawl further and further upwards until he’s lingering around the five-hundred dollar mark. His heart is beating rabbit-like against the cage of his ribs, embroiled in disbelief and surprise that Shane had spent _ this much _ on him, when he finds his camera. 

“Six-hundred and fifty-...” He whispers into his spread fingers, poised against his lips. “..Shane you dipshit..” 

He draws back, and looks down at the camera beside him. He reaches for it, and he curls its strap through his forefinger and his thumb. Excitement buzzes through him. Bewilderment swirls through his chest. He breathes out a choked-off laugh, a sound awash with shock, with surprise. He runs his fingers through his hair. He closes his eyes. 

He needs to make it up to Shane. He needs to show him how thankful he is. 

.xx.

He never would’ve predicted that Andrew would be camera-shy. 

It’s two-thirty in the afternoon. Their lunch rush has dissipated, and they’re due to close in an hour. The pastries are dwindling and their customers are milling about over the dregs of the last coffee of the day. Sun shines in clear shafts through the windows, bathing the cafe in a warm, golden glow. It’s _ perfect, _ and Andrew’s walls went up the moment Ryan fished the camera from his bag.

“Where’d you even get that?” He asks over the churn of the steam wand while Ryan fiddles with his lighting settings.

“Shane gave it to me.”

“What? Your new roommate?”

“Yeah.” Ryan looks up, “Why?”

“Haven’t you known him like… a month?”

“We’re good friends. When you live with somebody, you tend to get a little closer than you would otherwise.”

“I guess so.” Andrew leans forwards to pour the newly-steamed milk into the little ceramic cup already half-full with espresso. “When do I get to meet him?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yeah. You’ve been talking about him -- and the ghost -- so much that I feel like I have to meet at least one of them.”

Ryan considers. “I’ll tell him to come by. It’ll have to be on a Saturday. He works office hours. Now, are you gonna let me do this, or what?”

“What do you want me to do?” Andrew turns towards him, lifting the little coffee cup with him until its steam shrouds his features as he dares a tentative sip. 

“Be-... normal, and let me film you making a coffee.” 

“Be normal.” 

“Yeah. Like, don’t be awkward, don’t be weird. It’s just me, and nobody’s gonna see this, anyway. It’s just so I can practice.” He flips up the viewfinder, and latches it down again as if to puncture his point. 

Andrew watches him. “Fine.” He says, turning to tip the remainder of his freshly-brewed coffee out and into the basin by the machine. He rinses the cup clean, and sets it back down in preparation for another coffee. “This is stupid. You should be using it for your ghost shit.” He says, gesturing toward Ryan with a lax hand. 

“Huh?”

“Film the ouija board shit or something. Something that’s actually important. Not this.” But, he’s already shaking out the portafilter, and pausing to make sure that Ryan is ready.

“Yeah. I’ll do that too. This first, though.”

.xx.

He edits it together with the help of the iMovie app on his laptop, and compresses it into an MP4 file that he calls Shane over to watch late on a Friday afternoon, after they’ve both finished dinner. 

“This is the thing you’ve been editing?”

“Yeah. It’s got no sound.” Ryan adds, hastily - batting the headphones from Shane’s long fingers. “I didn’t wanna ruin it by adding music or something. Sound just gets distorted when you slow it down, anyway.” He sits forwards as he brings the tab up to fill the screen, and hovers his fingers over the play button. “Ready?”

Shane grins, eyes crinkling at the corners, lips drawing upwards into a deceptively broad smile. “Ready, man.”

Ryan presses play.

It’s artistic for what it is. The camera is easy to work with. It isn’t hard to get it to focus on the subject of the shot, and when it wouldn’t focus - Ryan only had to tap the part of the viewfinder he wanted the lens to notice. Andrew’s movements are stalled at half-speed, but the picture is impossibly clear, and impossibly smooth; illuminated with a gentle russet colouring that fills it with a cozy, rustic feeling. Smoke curls around his splayed fingers as milk heats, the coffee pours through the filter like liquid gold, and cascades smoothly into the little green mug. There’s a single shot of Andrew’s sheepish, smiling face as he leans in to pour the milk into the cup, swirling it carefully, expertly forwards to form a delicately filigreed pattern into the foam. 

Sound filters back in, of Andrew laughing, of the cafe’s characteristic clamour, as he lifts the cup to his lips to take a sip. 

“Who is that?” Shane asks, pointing to him as the last frame expires. 

“That’s Andrew. He’s my manager.” Ryan offers, loftily. “He’s nice, he’s just-... not comfortable being on-camera.” 

“He doesn’t look uncomfortable. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”

Shane’s expression is difficult to read. There’s a slight dampness to his eyes. A slight flush to his cheeks. Those tired circles have returned below his eyes. He looks paler, somehow-- drawn.

“Do-... you didn’t like it?” Ryan asks, reaching out to ease his laptop closed.

“No! No.” Shane shakes his head, firmly. “I liked it. You’re very talented. I think I’m just surprised.”

“Did you think I’d be hopeless?” Ryan asks, jokingly affronted.

“No!” Shane laughs. “No, I just wasn’t expecting _ this.” _

“I did film classes. I know how to edit shit, especially in iMovie. It’s basic shit compared to what we worked with in college.”

“I should’ve expected it, then.” Shane leans back, offering a noncommittal shrug. “My mistake.” 

.xx.

The idea of it crosses his mind from time to time. 

It finds its way towards him when he’s working the slow points of the day, when he can’t be entertained by Reddit or Facebook or the delights of his phone screen any longer, when Andrew is missing on his break, or when Ryan is toiling on the brisk and cold walk back to the apartment, or milling in its silence when Shane is out late for drinks with his friends from work while Ryan sits alone upon the couch. It nags at the back of his mind when he opens up Tinder while he lies, bored and exhausted, upon the couch. It offers him possibilities, novel-length fantasies, safety and security bundled up and tied with a neat daydream bow, pregnant with the promise of hours of entertainment. 

It creeps up on him at moments like these, when he lies awake at night, studying the cracks in his ceiling as if he might find something there, something to keep him from opening his Pandora’s box of possibilities. A distraction, a diversion, salvation, absolution. 

There’s nothing there, and lit by the glow of his rabbit-shaped night light, with the city some miles below him, tiny pinpoints of light against the horizon like a second night sky, he feels disconnected from the world. Perched up high in some haunted palace, with a roommate down the hall, a drafty bathroom, and strangely silent neighbours. 

He isn’t wearing a shirt. His duvet is bundled in a puddle over the tops of his thighs, trapping the loose fabric of his sweatpants against his skin. His room feels cold, but his skin prickles with warmth. His bedsheets feel too rough. His sweatpants feel too heavy, too close to him, too tight. 

He lifts his left hand, and touches two fingers to the dip of his sternum. His breath falls past his lips in a shuddering sigh. Warmth rises to his features. It prickles at his cheeks until they burn. It sweeps outwards, shifting like a volatile tide, sinking downwards, washing through him as if chasing the slow drag of his fingertips as they sink lower, and lower-- tracing a searing line toward the dip of his navel, and the downy hair below it that lead to the waistband of his sweatpants where he pauses.

He shouldn’t do it. 

Ryan’s eyes slip closed. His throat shifts as he swallows, dryly. He’s half-hard, and this wouldn’t be the first time he’s done away with his morals in favour of getting off. 

He tears open those daydream-blue ribbons. He starts the first page on his novel-fantasy. He tears open Pandora’s box. 

He thinks about Shane. 

He thinks about how warm his hands feel. He thinks about his smiles. He thinks about his laughter. About how he hunches down to Ryan’s height when they talk. How he smells early in the mornings, after he’s shaved, when his cologne still mingles upon his skin, fragrant with mint and sandalwood. How his hands drift across chopping boards and knife handles with the expertise of a commercial chef. He thinks about how warm and how solid he had felt in their embrace. He thinks about how he had looked coming out of the bathroom four nights ago, with a towel wrapped low around his waist, with steam coiling from his skin, flushed pink from the heat. He thinks about his crooked smile, about the curl of auburn hair sticking to his brow as he’d offered Ryan a sheepish smile as he ventured back down the hall, and towards his room. He thinks about the long line of his back, and the rivulets of too-warm water that had run the length of his spine, skating down the ridged steps toward the curled-over towel wrapped protectively around him. 

Ryan’s breath stutters past his lips. His fingers delve below the lip of his underwear. His too-warm fingers sweep against the base of his length. His breath catches. His heart lurches into his throat. His eyes press closed. His teeth sink into the plush bow of his lower lip, and his skin feels as if it’s on fire. 

His grip is tentative, and he feels as if he’s teetering on the edge already. It feels like too much; thinking about touching him, tasting him, _ kissing him. _ It feels taboo, it feels wrong, and Ryan’s cock swells under the curl of his fingers. He bites back a moan, back arching off the creased bedsheets beneath him. 

He had wanted to touch him then, and he wants to touch him _ now. _

He imagines what Shane’s touch might _ feel like _ . He imagines pressing his fingers through his dark and damp hair. His clothes sticking between them because Shane has hardly had the chance to dry off. Kissing him, greedy and commanding and sharp; as sure of himself in _ this _ as he is in every other aspect of his life. His long fingers close around the base of Ryan’s throat, his touch is possessive and demanding, as desperate and wanting as Ryan is _ now _. 

Another bitten-off cry falls past his lips. His hips hitch forwards, fucking into the shallow ring of his fingers. 

He’d be rough. He’d be eager. Using every inch of his height to pin Ryan to the wall, to part his thighs, to _ fuck him _ until the only thing Ryan can think about is _ him. _

“Fuck--!” His nerves sing on-end. His skin feels as if it’s aflame. His heartbeat roars between his ears. His breathing comes shallow and hitched. His knees bend, his thighs spread, falling apart as he strokes himself, as stars spark and dance across the backs of his eyelids while his fantasy flies away from him until he knows he can’t hold on. Pleasure ripples between his spread thighs, it pools low in his stomach, it settles at the base of his length, hot and demanding and wonderful. Everything he’s denied himself for a little too long. 

“God-..!” He turns his head, and he bites into his pillow just to keep himself quiet, lost amidst the idea of Shane’s long-fingered hands gripping his hips, holding him down, _ claiming him. _

Ryan’s eyes draw open again, dazzled, punctured by brightness, a flickering and sharp _ pop _ of light cuts across his field of view, and for a moment he’s half-sure he’s imagining it. The light above him flickers, it stutters on and shuts off -- flooding the room with light, and bathing it in darkness quicker than he can blink. It flounders. It sputters with sparks. It sprays with light. It flashes like a strobe. 

The rabbit-shaped nightlight hisses. It pops. Light puffs outwards. It flickers and shudders. It oscillates and wheezes, showering sparks outwards while Ryan, half-certain he’s dreaming, tips his head back with another quiet _ sob _. He’s drunk on pleasure. Lost in his fantasy. Enveloped in this artificial warmth that’s flooded him with pleasure, and blotted out reality.

He comes hard, and he comes fast. It cascades over him before he is ready for it. Ryan sees white, and an ear-splitting _ crack _ cuts through his hazy thoughts. 

He spills over his curled-over fingers, over his bare stomach, over the edge of his duvet. It’s hot and fast and rolled-up in a crescendo of blistering pleasure that crashes over him at once. He cries out, turning his head back into his pillow to muffle the sound as he takes in a ragged and broken _ gasp. _

With the beat of his heart still ringing in his ears, his grip grows lax. He comes back to himself in pieces, and when his breathing has evened out, his release has grown lukewarm, and the roar of his pulse has died down, Ryan opens his eyes to darkness. 

Blearily, he turns his head toward the power point by his bed, on the floor- where he plugs his phone in to charge at night, where he had plugged the rabbit-shaped night light in to offer him some respite from the dark. His vision sparks with colour in the dark, but there’s little he can make out. 

“...-the fuck?” 

He fumbles blindly against the blackness, peeling open the topmost drawer of his nightstand to fish out a wad of tissues to clean himself up, before he dares moving the sheets, and clambering upright; tossing the balled-up tissues carelessly into the small waste bin by his wardrobe as he carefully picks through the dark, stepping on clothes and discarded socks as he makes it to the light switch. He flips it, and looks up -- perplexed when the darkness persists. 

“Fucking hell.” He moves back for his bed, and fumbles through the blankets in search of his phone. He finds it, buried beneath his pillows. It lights up with the crude reminder that it’s one in the morning. His signal is still active, but their wifi is off. 

The power is blown.

.xx.

The day feels incomplete without their morning ritual. 

The power is still out when Ryan’s alarm clock blares at six, and his phone is left on a half-charge that won’t see him to the end of his work day. He stuffs the cord for his charger into his pocket as he changes into a plain pair of black jeans and a simple black crewneck; thankful once again that the cafe doesn’t have a strict uniform code for its baristas. 

He shuffles out and into the living room to find Shane in the kitchen, with his phone cradled to his ear by his shoulder as he tosses their spoiled food into a black garbage bag on the kitchen island, red-faced, tired-eyed and looking as frustrated as Ryan feels. He looks up as Ryan enters, and offers a small nod towards him, reaching up to take hold of his phone within elongated fingers. 

“Oh, yes. That time sounds fine.” He’s saying, holding out a hand to stop Ryan from leaving. “Ryan will be home. He’ll be the one to let you in. I don’t finish until five.” 

He hesitates, tipping his head ever so slightly, a questioning look flitting across his features, curious to know who Shane could be speaking to. 

“Fantastic.” Shane’s gaze swivels towards him, “Thank you. Bye, Reggie.” 

Understanding dawns, and Ryan leans against the counter to watch as Shane ends the call, and deposits his phone onto the counter. It’s nearing the end of its battery life as well. 

“Reggie’s gonna come by at some point after three-thirty. Is that okay?”

“Yeah. You told him about the power?”

“He thinks a fuse might have blown.” Shane frowns down at the phone. “I hope he can fix it.”

“Do we know what caused it?” Ryan asks, taking a short step forwards. 

Shane steps forwards hurriedly, scooping up the bag of waste and setting about knotting the bag to choke off the awful stench of spoiled food and soured milk, and trap it someplace that it won’t offend them. “I don’t know.” He says, gaze low. “I was asleep. I figured you’d gotten up to more ridiculous ghost nonsense.” 

He shoulders past Ryan, lugging the bag after him. 

“I didn’t do shit, dude!” He counters, “I was asleep, too. My night-light blew out.”

“What?” Shane pauses by the front door. He looks back at Ryan, features almost pained. “It broke already?”

“Yeah. It like-... blew up. I honestly thought you were up making toast or something like that.”

“No. I was in bed, and you know what? I haven’t even had my morning coffee so it’s too early for me to be debating this with you, and I’m going to cut this conversation short before we can get into whether or not ghosts are real for the fifteenth time this week. I might have a stroke before we get that far. It’s just too much brain power that I don’t currently have.”

“Alright.” Ryan lets out a sheepish laugh. “We don’t gotta. I’ll be home in time to meet Reggie.”

“Be nice to him.” Shane says, easing the door open, “He seems like a nice man.” 

.xx.

Reggie arrives at four in the afternoon. Ryan answers the door with hands still caked in chocolate powder and with a band-aid wrapped around his thumb from a burn. He’s wild-eyed and wired, having downed one too many shots of espresso to make sure that his beans were adequately roasted, and he wonders if Reggie can tell. 

He’s a middle-aged man with a five o’clock shadow and beady, bloodshot eyes. His salt-and-pepper speckled hair is close-cropped and swept back. The early signs of wrinkles tug at his features, crinkling his eyes with crow’s feet, and creasing at the corners of his lips. It fills Ryan with some semblance of relief that they seem to be lines from laughter, and not from frowning. He smells heavily of cigarette smoke and old whiskey, but arrives with a toolbelt clasped about his waist, and a small stepladder under his arm. 

He gives Ryan’s hand a firm shake by way of greeting, peering past him only momentarily to assess the state of his apartment. 

It’s difficult to say if he’s pleased with what he sees. 

“Shane isn’t here?” He asks, dark eyes drifting between their impressively large flat-screen television and the state of his lush carpeting, no doubt protecting polished floorboards beneath. His voice is roughened and gravelly, as harsh as sandpaper from a lifetime of chain-smoking.

“Nah.” Ryan answers, drifting after him as Reggie makes for the linen closet, where their generator is stored away. “He works normal hours, and I think he might be out tonight after work anyway. You might see him, though-- if he gets off early.” 

He mills about uncertainty as Reggie sets to work, pulling tools from his belt, and opening a complex-looking grid on the inside of the cabinet that’s full of tangled-up wires he works slowly free. He gets him a glass of water, and sits behind him as he works, asking questions as the minutes tick by. 

Reggie has a wife and two adult daughters. He worked as a plumber for the majority of his life, and his hands are roughened and thatched with motley scars here and there as a testament to his lifetime of hard work. Now, he’s mostly retired save for freelance tasks here and there. He owns two properties that he leases, and he and his wife travel abroad the rest of the time. He lights up the most when he speaks about her-- an artist and a free spirit who encourages him to lean into his golden years early. 

“...-see we’re only fifty-five, but she wants to go to Tibet next.”

“Oh, why Tibet?” Ryan asks, with one foot braced against the doorframe, sitting sprawled out and leaning against the opposite wall. 

“There’s a lot of temples that she wants to visit. She’s very passionate about spirituality and all that, you know.” He trails off, and Ryan nods.

“Does she believe in ghosts?” He asks, haltingly. 

Reggie looks up from his work, one silver-flecked brow arching high. “Eh? I think so.”

“Do you?” Ryan asks, tipping his head forwards. 

Reggie’s gaze returns to the fuze box. “Dunno. Never seem to put much stock in that stuff myself.”

“Did, um-...” Ryan sits up, he leans forwards, he laces his fingers together in his lap, over the rumpled fabric of his shirt, toying with the edges of his band-aid. “...-did any of your other tenants ever-... think that this apartment was haunted?” 

Reggie is silent for a moment. The sounds of his tools clicking within the fuse box fill the silence while Ryan anxiously waits. His nerves settle on-end. His heart feels as if it’s lodged in his throat. Reggie’s expression is difficult to discern. 

“Nah. No more than any other apartment would be. Why do you ask?”

“Oh. No reason. I just-... ghost stories and all of that stuff, I find it interesting. That’s all.”

“Mmh.”

“Did anyone ever die in here that you know of?” He asks, trying to inject as much nonchalance into his words as he can. “Y’know, of old age or-... otherwise.” 

“Aye, one girl. She didn’t live here, though.” Reggie says, words almost thoughtless; it’s clear his focus is on his work. “She was down the hall, but she was involved with a young lad living here.”

Ryan leans forwards, watching the older man as if waiting for him to look up, and smile. Waiting for him to say he’s just pulling Ryan’s leg. But he doesn’t-- he doesn’t continue, either.

“It-... didn’t end well?” he ventures, carefully. 

“He killed her. It was in the news and all that a good two months before I bought the place.”

“What was her name?”

“Esther? I don’t remember.” His words trail off into an indistinct murmur. “Pass me the pliers, won’t you?” 

Ryan scrambles forwards, reaching out to snatch up the rubber-gripped pliers. He offers them to Reggie, who accepts them wordlessly. 

“...-and there we go! Give the light a go for me?” He asks, looking toward Ryan.

Quickly, he gathers himself to his feet, and crosses the hallway to the lightswitch. He reaches out to flip the switch up, and when light floods the length of the hallway, a smile drifts over his parted lips-- relief filters through him at once. 

“Incredible.” he says. “Thank you so much, Reggie.” 

“Ah, no worries, mate. It’s part of the lease. It was just a blown fuse. If you’ve got an old toaster or somethin’ like that, a kettle or anything, my advice would be to toss it. Otherwise one of you two is going to have to learn how to do basic maintenance. I won’t be able to help you from Tibet.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to.” Ryan commends, moving to the older man’s side to help him pack away the last of his supplies. 

  


.xx.

Ryan is up late that night, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed, illuminated by the glow of his laptop screen, drifting through the archives of the city herald in search of an article on how ‘Esther’ died. Reggie hadn’t given him a time frame, hadn’t given him a motive, hadn’t given him any proof. For all he knew, this story could be just that -- an old folk tale to dissuade tenants within the complex from fraternising, lest they be thrown from a great height and to their death. 

They’re miles above the city, here. The mere thought of being pushed, falling, or leaping from a height as great as this is enough to have Ryan’s stomach churning with discomfort. It would be enough to kill anyone. It’s no surprise that the balcony railing is too high for either he nor Shane to clamber over if they could want to. It’s no wonder that there’s no roof access in a building this sky-high. It shouldn’t surprise him as much as it does, especially considering that he can’t find any proof of a woman dying in this area of the city in the midst of a lover’s quarrel. He finds plenty of robberies, car accidents, muggings-gone-wrong, bank-robberies and petty theft, but the majority of murder cases listed are perpetrated by men, _ against _ men. 

“Maybe Reggie got the details wrong…” He mutters to himself, voice muffled by the splay of his fingers spread unevenly across his too-full lips. “...-who knows how long he’s owned this place. Could’ve been decades back. Maybe they didn’t have the internet back then. Which means I’d have to go to a library to check archives and who has time for that…” 

There is a creak from the hallway. Ryan looks up. 

The glow from the bathroom light illuminates the gap between his door and the floor. He watches it stutter on, and cast its bold and golden glow across the grains along the carpet. 

The air in the room feels cold. 

Slowly, Ryan reaches out. He curls his fingers against the lid of his laptop, and he eases it down. He pushes his bedsheets away from his legs, and he drifts forwards to clamber off his mattress. His bare feet are silent against the carpet as he ventures toward his closed bedroom door. 

He turns his head aside. He closes his eyes. He thinks back to all of the times that Shane has told him that his other senses grow stronger when he focuses on them. So he holds still. He listens. 

There is another distant _ creak _ from the hallway. The sound of slow footsteps stepping deftly along that one loose floorboard in the middle of the corridor reach him. They are dulled and distant, but deliberate and discrepant, as if somebody or something is walking that floorboard like an acrobat on a tightrope. He can hear the shift of weight moving from foot to foot as sure as he might a corporeal figure. 

Ryan’s blood runs cold with fear. His heart seizes. It lurches into his throat. His eyes draw open. When he reaches for his doorknob, he sees his hand is trembling in the vacant half-dark. He swallows, throat feeling dry -- and he curls the knob as carefully, as slowly as he can. It doesn’t make a sound as the cold brass handle settles in the curve of his palm, and as he eases it back, he inches forwards. He bites down upon the plush bow of his lower lip, and -- still shaking, he listens.

He can hear it still, the slow pace of deliberate footsteps, creaking against that loose floorboard as if to tease him, as if to tempt him. 

Ryan opens the door wider. His hand comes away from the handle. He braces a palm against the doorframe. He leans forwards, and he peers past it -- and down into the dark hallway. 

It’s flanked by the glow of the bathroom light that bathes his profile in gold. The hallway is dark, illuminated faintly by the moonlight that peeks in from the opposing window at the other end, shining off the glass casings protecting their photos and pictures framed along the wall, but there’s nobody there. Not a silhouette, not a figure, not a form. There’s nothing. 

Ryan swallows. He pushes his door open wider, he steps into the hallway. He looks to the other end, where the moonlight greets him again through their wide balcony windows. The apartment looks, for all that Ryan can tell, to be completely empty otherwise. 

But, it doesn’t explain away the bathroom light. 

Determined, he starts down the hall, moving for Shane’s room. His door is closed and when Ryan tries the handle -- locked. So, he knocks; three sharp raps that cut through the silence. 

“...-what?” Shane’s voice is muffled and hoarse. 

“Can you open the door?”

“No. I’m asleep.”

“You don’t sound asleep. Open the door, Shane. Please.”

“What’s the matter?”

The sound of bedsheets rustling chase his words. Ryan hears another dull creak, and the sound of Shane cursing under his breath. A light turns on, and the lock flicks free. Shane eases the door open. 

His hair is a mess. Wild coils of auburn sit in disarray atop his head. His eyes are dazed and half-lidded, pupils dilated into pinpricks as they struggle to adjust to the bright light. His shirt is too large for him and stained at the hemline. His sweatpants hang low along his waist. 

Ryan doesn’t let his gaze linger.

“Did you turn on the bathroom light?” He asks in a rush. 

Shane blinks, dazedly, at him. He leans forwards, resting a shoulder against his doorframe to look down the hall to where the bathroom light spills out. 

“Mm. No. I didn’t turn it on. I didn’t leave it on, either. Did you?”

“No.” Ryan counters, without looking away from him. “I left it off because I remembered how anal you got about the power bill.”

“I didn’t-... let’s not start using that word. It means one thing and one thing _ only.” _

“How do you explain that, then?” He asks, gesturing down the hall with his left hand.

Shane offers a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe you left it on after you went in there last. You were the last one to use it, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, but-..”

“See? Now who is being anal.” His lips quirk up into a grin. 

“--I saw it turn on. The light comes in under my door. I left it off. It turned on. Then, I heard somebody walking down the hallway, towards your room.” 

“What, right here?” Shane asks, pointing idly to where Ryan is standing. 

“Like-... here.” He steps back, shuffling across the floorboards until he finds the one that creaks- right in the middle of the hall, painted with lacquer to make it indistinguishable from the rest. He walks along it, like an acrobat upon a tightrope, until he finds the parts of it that creak. Carefully, he traverses its length, placing one foot in front of the other until it squeaks under his weight.

“This. I heard this.” He says.

“You heard the floorboards of an old building creaking.” Shane offers, flatly. 

Ryan’s hands drop to his sides. He pivots where he stands, turning back around to face Shane, expression tense and flat. 

“Yes. I heard something. I saw the light turn on. Do you really think I’m lying about that?”

“No.” Shane softens, stepping forwards, out of his doorway, into the hallway. “I don’t think you’re lying. But, I do think you’re tired, and you’re stressed. This complex was built in the eighties. It’s going to have some creaks and breaks.”

“Reggie told me somebody was murdered in here, y’know.” Ryan cuts in, sharply. 

Shane closes his eyes, slowly. “He _ what?” _

“A girl. Her name was Esther.”

“So-... are you suggesting this… Esther is the one turning on lights and making things creak?” 

“What else could it be, dude?”

“Wind.” Shane supplies, not missing a beat. “Settling noises. Somebody downstairs making noise. We aren’t the only ones in this building.”

“I know _ that. _ Shit keeps happening, though. I don’t know how you can keep writing it off so easily.”

“I can’t believe you woke me up for this-... _ nonsense. _ You do realise that it’s three-thirty in the morning, don’t you, Ryan? I have work in a few hours.” 

He starts back down the hallway, towards Shane. “I said I was gonna get you that proof, big guy, and I’m gonna. After work. You, me and a ouija board.”

“Ryan--..”

“..-and we’re gonna film the fucking thing. You’ll see.” 

“Where are we gonna get a ouija board?”

“I bought one last week.”

“Of course you did.” Shane draws back, shaking his head, rolling his eyes. “Fine. We’ll contact spirits after work. It’s a date. Now, go to bed, Ryan.” He reaches out to turn off his bedroom light, swathing them both in darkness once more. “Stop getting so twitchy about bathroom lights and creaky floorboards, or you’ll never sleep.”

“No promises.”

“Fine. Goodnight.” He drifts from view, swallowed up by the darkness inside his room, out of the encroaching reach of the bathroom light.

“G’night, big guy.” 

The door closes between them. 

.xx.

“I think Reggie lied to you.” Andrew had said at nine-thirty in the morning amidst their lunch rush, drowned out by the sound of the milk gurgling as it steamed under the careful guidance of his nail-bitten fingers. “I think he hopes you’ll extend your lease by investigating a murder that never took place.” 

His words settle over Ryan as he crouches in the middle of their hallway on Friday evening, fumbling with a cigarette lighter over the wick of a black candle. 

He has a dozen of them, arranged artfully in a smooth oval through the middle of the corridor, bordering that one creaky floorboard that he had heard the night before, with his camera carefully perched upon an end table, pointed toward them. The tips of his fingers sting from the mechanism, half sure that the lighter is close to expiring when Shane reappears from the kitchen with a small packet of redhead matches. 

“Here.” He says, reaching forwards to ease the thick black candle out of Ryan’s grip. “I’ll do that. Open the board instead.” He insists. 

Ryan’s gaze moves to the ouija board, still wrapped in plastic and unopened inside the store-issue plastic bag he’d used to carry it home. He reaches for it, and his hesitant fingers curl in the clinging plastic, weighted down with reluctance. Slowed with dread. Etched with trepidation so profound that Shane looks up from the third black candle he’s lit to peer, thoughtfully, towards him. 

“Ryan.” He says, and his tone is measured, searching, gentle. “...this was your idea. We don’t have to do this. Honestly? I don’t even think it will help your peace of mind any.” Shane reminds him, calmly. 

“No.” His steely resolve is set and offers itself plainly between them as Ryan peels back the plastic from the wrapped box, and dumps it, unceremoniously between them. “I’m tired of this shit, and if there’s a demon or a ghost in this house, I want to know what it wants. I’m done with being tortured.” He balls the plastic bag up in his left palm, and tosses it down the hall. 

“Tortured?” Shane asks, striking another match aflame, and holding it over another thick black candle. “By squeaky floorboards and shadows?”

“It’s not just that, dude.” Ryan counters, cooly. 

“What is it, then?” The wick sizzles aflame, a sight Shane watches with a boyish kind of appreciation. It illuminates his features with a warm glow, casting forgiving shadows over the planes of his cheeks, and the downturned corners of his eyes. He sets it upon the floor. 

Ryan sits back, fishing his keys from his pocket, watching Shane cautiously. “You’ve been sleeping well since we moved in, right?” He asks. 

“Like a baby.” Shane rebuffs. 

“That makes one of us.”

“You haven’t been sleeping?” Another candle flickers aflame, burning merrily. 

“No, dude. I’ve had nightmares almost every single night. I think it’s actually going to send me insane.”

“Dreams can’t do that, Ryan.” Shane reminds him, in that same soft, level tone that belies an undercurrent of warmth Ryan knows has no place in a conversation like this.

“I’m not an idiot. I know that. I wish you’d stop talking to me like that. It’s so condescending.”

There’s a beat of silence. Shane sets the last candle down, and blows out the flame whittling down his remaining match. He looks down at his hands almost… _ guiltily. _

“I’m sorry.” He admits. “I’ve never met somebody so… passionate about all of this stuff before. Most people will dismiss it outright. Or, they’ll decide that the idea of communicating with what could be out there as a dangerous idea. Or, they become priests who hold exorcisms and cleansing rites. There’s really no inbetween, you know?”

Using the jagged edge of his apartment key, Ryan slices through the adhesive plastic wrapping the board until he can tear it away, and discard it as artlessly as he had the plastic bag. He shoves his keys back into his pocket, and eases the lid off the box to look inside. 

The board is there, folded into two with a wide plastic planchette placed neatly on top. There’s an instruction manual tucked beneath it. He plucks it free and discards it, uncaring. 

“Don’t we need that?” Shane asks. 

“I’ve seen the movie.” Ryan mutters. “This isn’t exactly complicated. We have to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ when we start and finish. Those are the only instructions, really.” He pulls the board out, and unfolds it. He sets it down in the middle of the ring of candles. “Can you get the light? Oh-- and the camera too.” He asks, sparing Shane a glance. 

The taller man nods, and untangles his gangly limbs to clamber to his feet. He lopes gracelessly down the hall to switch off the hallway light, bathing them in the relative half-dark once again, lit by the lambent glow of a dozen black candles, flickering in a broad oval in the middle of the hallway, casting enough light to fully illuminate the board, and Ryan’s unsteady hands. He pauses behind the camera, artfully balanced on two shoeboxes by the doorway to Ryan’s bedroom, to start the recording.

“We need to sit inside the circle.” He says, shifting the board to give Shane room on its opposite side. He withdraws the planchette from the box, and then he nudges the vacant cardboard away from the candles-- just in case. 

Shane steps carefully over the candles, reminding Ryan distinctly of an antelope out in an open field. It’s an analogy that brings a faint smile to his lips. It helps disperse some of the tension setting along his broad shoulders, and behind his eyes. It helps to settle him. It helps to remind him that he should be safe here. He has Shane, after all. 

Nothing will touch him so long as Shane is here. 

The thought is odd and abrupt. It’s intrusive and unfamiliar. His smile bleeds away into a faint frown of confusion, and he shakes his head as if to dismiss it while Shane gets settled opposite him, long legs carefully folded before him so that he might rest his elbows to his knees and look, expectantly, up at Ryan. 

He leans forwards to place the planchette upon the board between them. “Is it filming?”

“I believe so.” Shane says. “How do we start?”

“We both have to be touching it-... the planchette.” Ryan settles it in the middle of the board, and rests the tips of his fingers against its flared end. Shane hesitates, reaching forwards with long fingers to rest the tips of both of his index fingers against the pointed tip. He looks up, sparing a glance at Ryan as if to ensure he’s conducting himself correctly. 

“I read that-... we have to warm it up, first-...”

“What is this, a football game?” Shane murmurs, words hinged with a chuckle. 

“..-we gotta draw figure-eights, dude, so-..” Carefully, he nudges his hands forwards. Shane falters, but he follows, sliding the planchette smoothly across the board’s smooth surface, skating around again, and again, and again in smooth loops, in coiled figure-eights like a skater in a rink. The beat of his heart is so unsteady and so uncertain, he wonders if Shane cannot hear it in the candle-lit space between them. There is a faint tremble to his fingertips, and to the bends of his elbows, an unsteadiness that belies the fear he’s concealing so haphazardly. His stomach twists itself into knots. His heart stutters against his ribs like a caged bird. He’s terrified.

“Is that enough figure-eights?” Shane asks, sounding breathless, distant, half-drowned by the distant ringing settling in Ryan’s ears.

He looks up, drawn abruptly from his thoughts-- and he nods. 

“Yeah. I think-... w-we can start.”

“Ryan.” He says, again. “We don’t have to do this.”

“It’s gonna keep me up for months if we don’t.” He says, voice tense. “I’ve lost enough sleep already. I don’t need to lose more _ wondering _ about this.”

Shane breathes a sigh, and he’s sitting close enough to Ryan that he feels the gust of his exhale as it washes over the cusp of his cheek. 

“We say hello first.” Ryan says, quietly. “So.” He guides the planchette toward the letter ‘H’ with Shane’s help. They spell out the word, with Ryan uttering each letter aloud, as if any entities, any sentient beings with them in the hallway, might hear him. 

Slowly, they ease the planchette back into the middle of the board. 

Another beat of silence follows. The candles flicker around them. 

“What are you going to ask?” Shane murmurs, softly. 

Ryan’s eyes drift shut. 

He’s thought about this plenty. Never in his life has he been granted the opportunity to use a ouija board. He’d made a deal to himself in his final year of highschool - after seeing a shlocky horror film that had kept him up for a week straight - never to toy with the strings of fate by playing with one. They’re conjuring tools. They invite evil in. That’s always what he had been taught, what had been embossed into his mind by his very catholic upbringing. They were the devil’s tools. They were not to be used as a plaything.

Yet, here he is-- sitting opposite his best friend of two months, feeling bolder than he ever would. Bold, and utterly terrified. 

His eyes draw open, and Shane is staring expectantly at him. His features are hooded, illuminated by low candle-light that casts shifting shadows across his expression until he looks almost indistinguishable. He’s here, Shane-- the one person Ryan’s met in his life who has maintained this stalwart and evergreen belief that supernatural elements don’t exist. 

He draws in a breath. 

“Is anybody here with us?” He asks it clearly, loudly. His voice carries down the stretch of corridor. It bounces off the painted ceiling, off their pictures - lining the walls in droves, off their closed bedroom doors and the creaking floorboards beneath them. It settles amidst their circle of shifting light, it coalesces in the faintest curl of subtle appreciation along Shane’s parted lips as he lowers his gaze to the planchette. 

Ryan looks down, watching their hands steepled in the middle of the board, breath caught in the back of his throat, caught between wanting the planchette to move, and wanting it to remain perfectly still. 

His fingers are shaking, he can see them trembling against the bottom of the planchette, held steady by the weight of Shane’s immovable fingertips. The planchette, however, remains still. 

“...-can you give us a sign if you’re here?” He asks, maintaining that same clear and firm tone that he hopes conceals his fear. “We just want a sign from you. We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to drive you out of here.”

He sees Shane offer a small and avian tilt of his head out of the peripheral of his vision, watching Ryan closely - no longer paying attention to their hands, as curious about his methods as he is about almost everything else Ryan does. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t so _ soothing. _

“I just want to know what you want.” Ryan continues. “I-I know, I sound-... s-scared right now. I am, and maybe you can-... help me not be so scared, you know? Maybe I can help you in return if I can-... understand what you want.” 

His unsteadiness has sent the planchette ever so slightly askew. He can see that, and he knows nothing supernatural caused the small shift in its position. That’s all him. He lifts his fingers, shifting to adjust them when an idea comes to him.

“Is your name Esther?”

Shane shifts. 

The planchette slides out from under Ryan’s fingers, sweeping sharply toward the right side of the board, where the letters ‘NO’ stare boldly up at him, radiant in gold by the flickering candles. His hands jerk back. He sucks in a shallow gasp. He clutches his palms to his chest as if they’ve been burned. Fear spikes sharply through him. His heart lurches into his throat. His blood runs cold. It drains from his features as his eyes go wide. He turns his gaze toward Shane, whose fingers still rest on the planchette where it sits, half-way toward ‘NO’.

“Are you fucking with me? Did you do that?” He asks, voice broken, stricken, small and child-like with _ fear. _ “It’s not fucking _ funny _ Shane.”

“You moved it.” His voice is strange. Coiled, distant, strained. “When you withdrew, I saw you--..”

“No. I didn’t. I was adjusting my hand. It _ flew _ out of my fucking hand, dude. Did you not see that?”

Shane looks up, his expression steely, wrought with an emotion Ryan can’t place, something far from amusement, far from the shit-talking, piss-taking coy half-grin he’s used to seeing there. Sincerity lies in the vacant depths of his amber-brown eyes.

“Play it back.” Shane says, looking towards the camera still pointed at them. His hands draw back from the planchette, and reach forwards for the candles.

“No, no!” Ryan reaches out to stop him, catching hold of his wrist. “We can’t, we have to-... gotta say goodbye. Gotta close it, otherwise it’s gonna get pissed.”

“It’s-... Ryan, come on.”

“Humour me.” 

He sighs, deeply. He reaches out, pushing the bunched sleeves of his hoodie further up his forearms as he reaches out to set his fingers upon the planchette once more. Ryan mirrors the movement, and together - they slide it down to the lower portion of the board to sweep it along the capitalised ‘GOODBYE’ with clear determination. 

“Goodbye.” Ryan utters aloud. “It’s done, Esther, you motherfucker.”

“_ Ryan.” _ Shane breathes, tone tinged - this time - with amusement. 

“Get the candles.” He structs, clambering hastily to his feet and very nearly tropping over one of the longer wicks as he hurries to the end table where his camera is propped. He folds down the viewfinder and stops the recording, flipping hastily into his gallery, fingers stuttering clumsily against the little buttons along the edge of the screen, breath caught in his throat all over again as he rewinds the take. 

Half of the candles are extinguished by the time Shane reaches him, hovering close to Ryan’s side as he presses play on the recording. 

The tinny sounds of his voice come distorted through the camera’s tiny speaker. It’s jarring and odd to hear his voice so unfamiliarly garbled, and he skips ahead through their set-up until they’re both sitting with their hands on the planchette. 

Ryan sees it there, as plain as he had seen it when it had first happened. His palms lift as he shifts the position at which he holds the planchette, and it slides out from under his grasp as if tugged askew by an intangible thread. Shane’s fingers follow it, jerked forwards in surprise, only for its momentum to stop the moment Ryan’s touch falls away.

“See? It moved.” He points with his free hand, jabbing a fingertip to the screen, leaving a kaleidoscope rainbow under the imprint of his fingertip. 

“You were moving.” Shane points out, calmly- breath tumbling over the column of Ryan’s throat. He tires to ignore how it sets his pulse aflame. “You made it move.”

“How can you deny that, dude? I was just-.. Adjusting my grip a tiny bit. I wasn’t holding it tightly enough to cause that to happen.”

“You’re scared. You’re only half-aware of what you’re doing when you’re scared.”

“Are you f-... are you serious right now?” Ryan steps back, he lowers the camera, he looks up at Shane. “I have proof right here in my hands, and you saw it with your own two eyes, but you’re gonna blame this on me… shifting my hands a tiny fucking bit?”

“Yes.” Shane says, simply. “The same way we don’t know how strength when adrenaline kicks in, we don’t know what we’re capable of when we’re afraid.”

“I’m not _ that _ scared!”

“Oh, please Ryan.”

“Whatever, dude. Fuck this. A ghost could slam you against the wall and you’d probably blame it on a fucking _ shift _ to the air.”

“I probably would, and that would _ still _ be more plausible than a ghost existing.” 

“You clean up the rest of the candles, dude. I’m gonna post this to YouTube, and then we’ll see who is right.” He lifts his brows, words phrased as a clear challenge. “How ‘bout that, big guy?”

.xx.

The footage takes longer than Ryan had anticipated to export onto his hard drive. His laptop is slower than he remembers when iMovie is active, and his patience soon wears thin as he sits on the edge of his bed with his laptop open atop his thighs, simmering at a heat so volatile that it’s beginning to burn the tops of his thighs. Carefully, he eases his computer onto the bedsheets beside him as he whittles his fingernails down to their roots under the nervous press of his teeth. 

His light is still on. His door is closed. His blinds have been drawn shut. His closet is closed. The lights in the hallway are out-- and Ryan is too scared to go to sleep. 

The idea of turning off his light seems like too grave of a task for him to undertake. He’s never quite understood what it is about the light that brings him such reassurance. His room looks the same in the dark, he knows, but the dark knows how to play tricks on his mind. It knows how to fill the void with incomprehensible shapes that shift and writhe. It knows how to offer up a myriad of wretched possibilities that have his blood running cold. It knows how to toy with him, how to send him to near-madness, even when he’d been a little boy. When this irrational fear had made a little more sense.

For, what grown adult is afraid of the dark? What grown adult sleeps with a night-light? 

Ryan breathes out a short hiss of irritation. He draws to his feet, and paces across his room to the light switch. He reaches up for it, and - turning his gaze back to where his computer sits, upon the middle of his bed - he turns the light off. 

The room plunges into darkness while his eyes struggle to adjust, still half-illuminated by the technocolour glow of his laptop screen, the far corner of his room is almost black. The space under his bed feels like a void. The idea of approaching his bed to clamber in feels like a voyage-- like hands could reach out from beneath the bed, rotten and distorted, and grip onto his ankles to pull him down into the drowning, choking dark. 

“No. Nope.” He turns the light back on. 

His courage comes back.

“Fucking. _ Fuck.” _

He knows what he has to do.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck this all. Fucking-... fuck it all upside down with an ice cream cone.” He strips back his bedsheets, he fishes his phone from the rumpled mess, and he flips his laptop open so that his video will continue to buffer. He turns his back upon it and his dishevelled bed, shoulders drawn into a taut line of self-inflicted frustration. “Fuck it. Fuck it all.”

He moves down the hallway quickly. His bare feet are silent against the polished floorboards. He flinches when one creaks under his weight, and he pauses outside Shane’s door. 

It’s ajar, offering the faintest peek into the room beyond, bathed in as much darkness as the underside of Ryan’s bed. Again, his heart lurches into his throat, sharp and abrupt with a kind of trepidation he knows has little to do with fear. He begins reconsidering as he stands there, teetering behind Shane’s half-closed door. He’ll be teased. Shane will shit-talk for months. He won’t let Ryan ever forget this. He won’t-...

“What do you want?” He hears Shane call, voice tired and rough, coming from the dark. 

His heart stutters. 

Ryan reaches forwards. With tentative hands, he pushes the door open wide enough to peek inside. 

He’s never been inside Shane’s room before. He’s lingered outside it while waiting for clothes, a charger, or even Shane himself countless times. He’s caught glimpses here and there of a messy floor or a pair of toppled-over shoes, half-tangled in laces by the doorway, but little more. There’s little reason for Ryan to venture to this end of the hallway, and he’s never been one for invading privacy in such a blatant way. 

“I-.. um-...” He hesitates, unable to make out the posters Shane has stuck to his walls, nor the cluttered frames artlessly arranged atop his dresser. He drums his fingers against the edge of the door, words jumbled and tangled upon the tip of his tongue, stuck beneath the weight of his pride. He sucks in a deep breath, gathering up the last dregs of his courage for the night, using them to fuel his request as he offers it up in a voice small enough to belong to a terrified child.

“Can I sleep in here tonight?” 

There is a pause. He stares into the darkness as if it might look back at him. That stretch of stillness lingers. It persists for long enough that Ryan starts to reconsider, long enough for him to recoil again, as if he’s been burned.

“You-... want to sleep here? With me?” Shane asks, voice a little less heavy.

“I can sleep on the floor. I’ll get my pillow, or-..”

“No.” 

He hears the sound of fabric shifting, rumpling- he hears springs creak as weight shifts. 

“There’s room in here. Come in. Close the door after you.” 

He does as he is told, easing the door closed behind him until the latch clicks. 

Navigating the unknown terrain of Shane’s bedroom floor in the dark proves to be a herculean task in itself. Twice Ryan is certain he steps on books and rumpled puddles of clothing. He hisses out a short ‘ouch!’ of pain as something sharp prods into the tips of his toes, but the edge of the bed soon meets the open splay of his fingers as he gropes through the darkness. Clumsily, he peels back the duvet, and clambers in beneath it, sliding his phone under the pillow as he settles against it. 

The rumpled sheets are warm. They are fragrant with Shane’s sandalwood-and-mint aftershave, with his distinctly citrus-infused hair product, intermingling with the perfume of freshly-washed linen into a brew of intoxicating scents Ryan thinks he could curl up in and be perfectly content. 

He shifts, lifting his hands toward his chest, and almost freezing when he feels the backs of his knuckles drag against the outside of Shane’s arm. Again, the mattress shifts, and Shane turns to face him. 

Ryan’s eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness, but he can make out the sharp edges and deep slopes of his profile in the moonlit dark. His eyes are open, and gazing at Ryan as if he, too, cannot quite comprehend how they ended up here, together.

It feels intimate. It feels clandestine. It feels like the beginning of something Ryan can’t name. It feels like the ending of something else - an ending he isn’t going to mourn. An ending that snapped shut when Shane left the bathroom in a swirl of steam two weeks ago. As if all of those moments, every single one, had somehow led them here. 

“You’re still scared.” The silence is broken by Shane’s voice, a whisper - as if there’s someone else here to hear them.

Ryan blinks, and he lowers his gaze; wanting to reach out to bridge the gap between them, to trace the tips of his fingers along the aristocratic arches of Shane’s hollow cheekbones. 

“You’re not?” He counters, voice equally as gentle. 

“Why should I be? The most dangerous thing in this apartment is you.” 

Ryan breathes out a dry laugh. “Me?”

“You’re capable of incredible feats when you’re terrified, Bergara.” 

“Shut up, big guy.”

“Mm.” The bedsheets shift. “What do you think it is? A ghost? A demon?”

“A ghost.” Ryan murmurs. “I think Reggie is onto something. Maybe Esther is real. She toyed with us, you know? Demons don’t do that.”

“They don’t?”

“Demons are like dogs. They come when they’re called.” 

There’s a beat of silence between them. He sees Shane blink. He sees a faint wrinkle appear between his heavy brows. 

“A pastor told me that once.” Ryan continues, “...-around the same time that he told us never to use ouija boards.”

“What?” Shane breathes out, and Ryan doesn’t have to look at him to know that he’s smiling.

“My mum put us in a youth group-... my brother and I. There was a church down the road from home, and we used to go on Saturday afternoons. He’d-... tell us shit like that, and that we’d go to Hell if we touched ourselves or uttered the lord’s name in vain.”

“That’s-... a healthy mindset to offer to young children.” Shane murmurs. “You know, I don’t know a lot about your life before you came here.”

“You didn’t ask.” Ryan murmurs. “I didn’t think you cared.”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Their knees brush under the covers. “Where did you grow up?”

It sets off a string of questions. Shane asks him what his favourite colour is. What his favourite flower is. He asks about Jake, about Ryan’s mother, carefully tip-toeing around the subject of his dad as if he _ knows _that it isn’t territory Ryan is willing to venture into (let alone share). He asks about school, about Ryan’s friends from his hometown, and where they are now. He asks about college, about film school, about projects Ryan loved working on, and ones he hated. He doesn’t think twice about sharing his secrets and sorrows and hiding places with him. They talk until Ryan’s eyelids feel heavy, until the silences between Shane’s questions and his answers stretch greater and greater. They talk until all thought of the ouija board and Esther are far from mind, until Ryan’s forgotten the time, and the dark; until Shane’s quiet voice is the only thing tethering him to reality. 

“Go to sleep, Ryan.” Shane says, eventually; lying close enough to him that his warmth bleeds through the rumpled linen between them, until Ryan could tip his head forwards to rest against his shoulder (and the prospect is tempting). 

“They won’t find you here.”

.xx.

Ryan wakes up to an empty bed. 

The hazy midday light sines boldly in through the window beside Shane’s bed, sending golden shafts of slatted light across the curve of his spine, warmed by the rising sunshine enough to rouse him. His eyes draw open blearily, and his fingers drift across the thatched linen under his palms towards the empty side of the bed. The sheets are cool but disturbed. The faint scent of Shane’s aftershave still lingering upon the pillow is the only evidence left behind that he had ever been present at all. 

There’s a clatter from the kitchen, and Ryan shifts beneath the covers bundled about his waist. He recalls the night before with enough clarity to remember the last question of Shane’s he’d answered. He wonders if there had been another, if Shane had paused while waiting for him to answer, and Ryan had simply drifted off. 

Slowly, he draws the bedsheets back, and he sits up. He rubs the heels of his palms against the backs of his eyelids and he squints in an attempt at bringing the room around him into focus. 

He isn’t sure what he’d expected to see. Shane was full of odds and ends, tangled quirks and knotted habits, strange eccentricities that made him so unlike anybody else that Ryan had ever met- the bedroom before him seems only fitting.

It’s cluttered. There’s a double bookshelf against one wall that’s crammed full of history books written by authors with names too complex for Ryan to comprehend. There’s pictures of his family, of his brother, of his friends from Chicago, and even a smattering of polaroids tucked here and there with photographs that look as though they were taken at school, or maybe college. His room is brighter than Ryan’s, with more colours smattered about. There’s a lei draped across the top of the bookshelf. A colourful sari that looks like it was a souvenir from someplace warm and tropic draped against the end of the bed. Ryan’s fingers drift across it as he draws slowly to his feet, and ventures around behind the bed, eyes alight with wonder, with interest as he looks closer at the photos. 

He recognises Shane’s dad easily enough. It seems that the resemblance comes from him. His brother looks a lot like him-- but sharper, somehow. Harsher. In every photo, they are arm-in-arm, full of smiles, full of laughter. They’re a happy family, and from the details Shane has offered him in the past, his family is a very, very loving one. 

Ryan moves towards his desk, where his laptop sits by a small reading light and two stacked spiral notebooks. Despite his curiosity, Ryan doesn’t indulge. His fingers dance across the scuffed cover of the topmost notebook, before they move to Shane’s work briefcase, which is as beaten and thatched as his shoes. 

It brings a smile to Ryan’s lips. He offers a small shake of his head. He turns to take his leave, moving tiredly back into the hallway, with a dozen black candles half-burned to their wicks are cluttered against the small end-table by the wall. He gazes reproachfully at them as he passes, unwilling to dwell too long on the events of the night before as he wanders into the living room. 

Shane is there, drinking from a bear-shaped coffee cup that seethes steam across the angular curve of his nose. He’s perched upon one of the wooden stools tucked into their kitchen island, with a book open in front of him, and his elbows resting upon either side of it. He looks up when Ryan enters, and offers him an encouraging smile over the rim of his coffee cup. 

“Morning.” He says, before tipping his left wrist inwards to glance, pointedly, at his watch. “...or, afternoon, I suppose.”

“Yuck it up, man.” Ryan mutters, moving automatically for the cabinet housing their mugs. He needs a coffee. “Could’ve woken me up when you got up.”

“I did, actually. You just grunted. I thought it was best to leave you to your own devices. How did you sleep?” Shane asks, and Ryan can feel his gaze upon him, peering at him thoughtfully through the rims of his clear-framed glasses. It’s a careful and searching kind of look that Ryan has come to grow accustomed to; as if everything he does is somehow fascinating to him. As if everything he does is some small revelation. 

“Good. Y’know. Considering-..”

“Ah. Yes.” Shane looks away, thumbing his book closed. “The ghouls.”

Ryan dumps his coffee cup unceremoniously beneath the spout of their coffee machine, and presses the button for a _ large _ cup. He turns where he stands to face Shane, and he leans his hip against the edge of the bench. He folds his arms across his chest, and levels a flat stare at the other man. 

“I did want to ask about something, actually.” Shane starts, shifting where he sits, re-adjusting his position to face Ryan as best he can upon the stool.

“Mm?” Ryan’s irritation is soon forgotten. He lifts his chin, inquiringly. 

“Well, you see-... I still don’t know my way around the city, and despite the people at work, I don’t have very many friends here-..” He pauses to frown at the coffee machine as it trundles to life, but soon continues speaking- raising his voice to be heard over the tumble-and-grind of sound simpering from it. “..-and my mum is coming to visit in a couple of days. She’s only staying for a night. I was hoping, you know-... you might want to have lunch with us. Me and my mum. I thought I could-... bring her to your cafe, maybe. You said that there’s food there--?”

“Oh.” Ryan’s brows lift, a plain look of surprise flitting across his features as he joins his hands, uncertainly, together. His heart tugs. Something unfamiliar and trembling knots in his stomach. Warmth floods through him with the realisation that Shane _ wants him to meet his mother. _

“Wait-..” He frees a hand to hold it up, palm-out. “I’m not a last resort, am I?”

“No!” Shane insists, hastily. He lowers his gaze to the glossy cover of the paperback volume in front of him, and he toys with the corner. “You’re-... my first choice. Obviously. I just-... I didn’t want to put you on the spot.”

“Nah, man.” Ryan grins, crooked and broad. “I’m always down to meet the parents.”

.xx.

“Wow. That’s big.” Andrew says, leaning up against the pastry display with a lopsided smirk. “Are you gonna dress up? Put on a bowtie? Make a good impression?”

“Shut up, dude.” Ryan grins, wiping down the edges of the espresso machine with a damp cloth that he drapes thoughtlessly over his opposing shoulder. “I just want her to-... _ not _ hate me, y’know? I’m not good at first impressions.”

“I don’t know about that. You met Shane at one party, and he agreed to move in with you. You couldn’t have been that terrible at it. Most people would be running away from you at a proposition like that.”

“Yeah. I was drunk when we met.” Ryan reminds him, pointedly. “I’m gonna be sober and hopped up on caffeine when I meet him and his mum.”

“Well, _ I’m _ excited. I finally get to put a face to his name. I’m tired of hearing about him and not knowing what he looks like.” 

That brings a frown to Ryan’s brow. Has he been talking about Shane too much? Has he been irritating Andrew? Has he been boring him? He turns his attention back to the grounds container in front of him instead, intent on busying his hands when Andrew interjects.

“Have you ever thought about having a priest cleanse the apartment?” He asks, boldly. “If you’re so worried about it being haunted by some girl’s ghost, maybe you could hire a holy-somebody with Jesus-merch to come and-... spray some holy water, or-... something. Look, I didn’t go to a Catholic school. I don’t know how this works.” He admits, trailing off with a sheepish chuckle. 

Ryan looks up, “What, like a house call but with a priest?”

“Yeah. They do that, right? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on TV shows before. Don’t the couple in Paranormal Activity get a priest to come over?”

“No. He was a Demonologist--”

“A what?!” Andrew cuts in, laughing. 

“Shut up! He wasn’t a priest. I don’t even _ know _ if priests do that, but maybe it could help. I don’t suppose you know anybody?”

“Of course I don’t. I’m a rational adult. Maybe just google it. We live in one of the biggest cities in the world. I’m sure there’s a certified priest kicking around somewhere who is just dying to have some contact with the diabolical.” Andrew mutters. 

“Jesus, dude. You really don’t know shit about religion, do you?”

.xx.

It takes some intense googling. He lounges on the couch with his laptop open over his thighs for a good two hours after work, still in his ‘uniform’, searching through pages and pages of churches, organisations and parishes of organised faith in the hopes of finding a priest who might pay their home a visit. He finds plenty who offer visiting sick patience or hospital-bound believers. He even finds one Greek priest willing to ward the home against evil spirits, but that isn’t quite what Ryan is seeking. While a barrier against evil would be helpful, he’s fairly certain that the evil has already burrowed deep into the rafters of the apartment, and it’s showing no sign of leaving for a weekend vacation. 

He worries at his lower lip in quiet frustration, drifting across two articles about a priest who performed exorcisms downtown, but every review written about him is filled with anger-fuelled insults that include the words ‘phony’, ‘fake’, ‘fraud’ and ‘money-grabbing’. Ryan decides against him. 

He’s reached his limit by the end of his second hour, close to giving up his search entirely, when he comes across a website hosted upon a free domain, belonging to a ‘Thomas Givens’, a priest of Catholic upbringing who specialises in supernatural beings. He touts himself as a practitioner of ‘alternative’ methods, and his pictures paint the image of any ordinary priest, dressed in traditional gilded garb and ornate hats with large crucifixes draped dramatically across his frame. He looks no older than forty, with a salt-and-pepper beard growing across his jawline, and a friendly smile pulled across his lips. He looks entirely ordinary. Extraordinarily predictable. But, nevertheless, he’s a priest cut from a different cloth.

There’s no reviews, but his website has posts dating back as far as 2005. Maybe that’s a good sign. 

Thoughtlessly, Ryan reaches for his phone. 

.xx.

He wakes hours later to the feeling of a cool breeze drifting along the crest of his left cheek. His heavy eyelids flutter, and sluggishly -- he turns his head. 

The sun has set. He’s sprawled out on the couch, his laptop sits on the coffee table, and his phone is wedged under his left shoulder, an uncomfortable and rigid weight pressing impatiently into his skin. He grimaces, and rolls his arm back in an effort to retrieve it while his gaze skirts the perimeter of the living room, before settling upon the open balcony door. 

Shane is outside, leaning against the railing of their balcony, still in the staple blue button-down and black slacks he wears into the office, staring wistfully down at the city far below them like a king surveying his kingdom from a plateau high above. The stars wink down at him from the sky above, dazzlingly mistefying, until Shane is little more than a dark silhouette against the blue velvet of the night beyond. 

Ryan lifts a tired hand to rub his fingertips across the backs of his eyelids. He’s still _ tired. _ It’s a bone-deep kind of exhaustion that feels as if it’s made its home in his joints, in his muscles, in his sinew and his core. As if he could sleep for a week straight and still awaken tired, and in dire need of a nap. He grunts as he draws himself upright to sit. The couch creaks beneath him, and Shane turns his head from where he stands on the balcony, hearing him.

The moonlight illuminates his profile with a sliver of shifting silver light, casting along the shallow tilt of his jawline, curving along the bow of his upper lip. Settling along the crease below his eye. He looks inhuman. He looks like a spectre from the sky. A constellation breathed to life. A cerebral and ephemeral being that doesn’t belong on earth. 

Ryan squeezes his eyes shut, and sets his feet upon the carpet. He buries his face in his hands. 

He hears the sound of the balcony door sliding closed, and that stringent, cold breeze cuts off. Light dapples across the backs of his eyelids, shining in between his parted fingers as he muffles another quiet groan, as Shane turns on the light. 

“..are-... are you feeling okay?” Shane asks, voice tenuous. 

“Yeah.” He utters it from behind the heels of his palms. “Think so.”

“You look pale.”

“Mmf-..” He rubs his fingers against the backs of his eyelids. “I just-...” His hands come away, they hang lax between his parted knees, elbows resting along his thighs. “I feel so fucking tired, dude.”

“Get some sleep.” Shane offers, unhelpfully. The grimace that settles upon his parted lips implies he _ knows _ that. 

“It’s not that.” Ryan mutters. “No matter how much fucking sleep I get, I’m always tired. Ever since I moved out here-...” He trails off, running his fingers through his hair, a dark mop of tangled-together curls he knows must look a sight atop his head. 

“I mean-... you _ do _ think that this apartment is haunted. You’ve been having nightmares. It’s causing you stress. That would make it hard for anybody to sleep.” Shane says, words thoughtful, and slow. 

“Nah. It isn’t that. I thought the house I grew up in was haunted. But, I still managed to live there for four years _ and _ start an uprising among the neighbourhood kids without needing to take a nap break.”

“That sounds exhausting, but also unsurprising.” Shane mutters. 

“I dunno what it is.” His fingers rake backwards, pushing through his dark curls, settling at the nape of his neck. “It’s frustrating. I feel like I’m getting nothing done. I wanna go out. I wanna play basketball. I wanna see Eugene again. I wanna hang out with Andrew. But, I’m awake for four hours and then the exhaustion just sets in again, and I don’t feel like myself. I feel like I’m just this-... Ryan-shaped shadow. I can only do half of the things that real-Ryan can do.”

The couch shifts as Shane sits alongside him, feet parted upon the carpet. He leans back, unfolding his long limbs against the back of their large couch so that he can look down at Ryan from beneath half-lidded eyes. There is something strange in his expression. Something deeply conflicted, concerned, uncertain of what to say, of how to help. It’s plain that he _ wants to _, but what can he do - aside from tell Ryan to get more sleep?

“Are you staying up late?” He asks. 

“No.” Ryan murmurs. 

“Are you leaving your laptop on when you sleep?”

“I mean. Sometimes. But it goes to sleep by itself after an hour.”

“Do you drink coffee late into the day?”

“...yeah. Sometimes. I also drink-... a shitton at work.”

“Maybe it’s time to cut back.”

“I _ have _ to. I’m a barista. How else am I meant to know if I’ve roasted the beans right unless I taste them?”

“Well. Do you have to swallow? Do you have to down an entire shot? Maybe you just… take a sip from now on.”

Ryan’s fingers skirt over the cusp of his brow as he considers. He’s always known that he likely drinks too much coffee. He attempted to give it up cold turkey three months before his finals, and the residual ear-splitting headache had been so terrible that he’d felt crippled for the first two days. He’d given up, in the end, and relegated himself to two coffees a day. But, since getting the job at the cafe, that number had crept up closer to five if he includes every shot of espresso he ‘tastes’ while working. 

Andrew values the quality of his beans. Ryan would feel as if he was doing the shop a disservice if he wasn’t being so discerning. 

“Fine.” He concedes, as reluctant as a petulant child. “Less coffee.”

“How many do you have a day?” Shane asks. 

“...what’s a normal amount to have?”

“I don’t know. Two? I have two. One before work. One after lunch to keep me going through the rest of the day.”

“Fuck.” Ryan’s head throbs preemptively at the thought of cutting back that severely, while being surrounded by the object of his addiction for eight hours a day.

“It’ll help you sleep.” Shane’s voice is quiet, but encouraging. “It’ll be good in the long run. If you pull it off-...” He holds out a hand, leaning forwards. “...-I’ll play you, one-on-one in basketball.”

Ryan draws back, turning his head to look at the long-limbed man beside him as if he’s sprouted a second head. 

“You? _ You’re _ gonna play basketball?” His brows quirk upwards.

Shane grins, crookedly. 

“Fine. Deal. I won’t crack, big guy. Better strap on your sports shoes.” He reaches out to grip Shane’s hand within his own. It’s warm, despite the draft from outside.

“My sports shoes?” Shane splutters out, laughing. 

“You don’t even own any, do you!?” Ryan shoots back, and - concealing their guffaws, they fall back into their familiar routine with ease. 

Shane cooks to the backdrop of quiet and ambient jazz music he insists is one of humanity’s best inventions while sizzling risotto for them. Ryan helps by chopping mushrooms and drifting around the island, heckling Shane as he hovers over the cooktop with the air and arrogance of a proud mother hen. 

.xx.

He isn’t sure exactly how it happens, only that it’s quarter-past three in the morning, and (yet again) he cannot sleep. His reflection is despondent and unhelpful, supplying him only with a glimpse of his tired-eyed features in the misty bathroom mirror. He looks harrowed, exhausted, and like he might well be anemic. His hair is a wild mop of dark almost-curls atop his head, and his shoulders feel languid, and heavy. 

Sluggishly, he splashes his face with the icy-cold water trickling from the sink, before he shuts off the water, wipes his face on a small hand-towel, and turns to take his leave. He lifts his hand for the doorframe, fingertips creeping for the switch against the wall, when he stops dead in his tracks. 

From the bathroom doorway, he has a direct glimpse into his bedroom, and the window built into the wall over his dresser with heavy slats and powder-blue curtains he’s never pulled closed. 

Staring back at him, behind the slats, is a figure. It’s a silhouette, an outline of black illuminated by the glow of the bathroom light, dappled in silver from the light of the moon, with eyes that reflect like the lenses of a nocturnal creature’s retinas. It’s staring at him fixedly; like a predator that has spotted its prey, and is waiting for the right moment to pounce. It is almost indistinguishable against the dark night sky, difficult to define under the glare cast by the bathroom light. But evil. Ornery, wretched and _ evil, _ most definitely.

Ryan freezes in the doorway. 

His hand remains there, poised against the frame. His heart stutters. It leaps into his throat. His blood runs cold. Fear swells, heavy and urgent, within his chest. He’s frozen. Terrified. What should he do? Should he scream? Should he move? Should he throw something at the window to get it to leave?

“What the fuck-...?” He whispers, sure of what he’s seeing, now; positive. Entirely, entirely positive. If there had ever been any doubt in his mind that this apartment was haunted, it’s eradicated now. Gone-- out the window of their fortieth-floor building--..

“What the FUCK-?!” He echoes. 

They are on the _ fortieth _ floor. 

_ How is it doing that? _

“Shane!” He calls, after a moment, voice hinged with terror, cracked with hysteria, wild and unhinged. “Shane! _ SHANE!” _

There is a thud from down the hallway. Ryan tears his gaze away from the spectre. He looks down the hall, and Shane stumbles, haphazardly, out of his bedroom. 

“What?”

Ryan looks back into his bedroom, back toward the window-..

...and it’s gone.

“Fuck!”

He starts forwards, hand sliding down the doorframe as he trips over his own bare feet as he stumbles across the hallway, and into the familiar darkness of his own bedroom. He hurries to his window, and fumbles over the lip of his dresser to reach for it, knocking an old basketball trophy from his freshman year clean onto the floor as he presses his palms to the frosty glass to peer outside.

“What the fuck?”

“Ryan?” Shane’s voice is bleary and uncertain, seemingly far-off behind him. Distant. He might as well be in another universe entirely for all that Ryan cares. 

He reaches out to push the slats aside, sweeping them back to rest against the backs of his shoulders rather than pulling on their drawstring as he reaches for the lip of his window, twisting the lock back around, and pulling it impatiently up with trembling hands. His arms strain under the effort. Wood creaks and squeals as it is budged. It’s been a good long while since somebody last opened this window.

Ryan isn’t sure if that makes him feel better or _ worse. _

He leans out the window, bracing his hands against the sill to peer outside, and down onto the buzzing city streets below. The roads cut through high-rise buildings riddled with speckled silver lights like purl knots. Cars trail ardently along them like beads upon a ribbon and the cool breeze threads its listless fingers through his dark hair as if to comfort him.

The edge of their building is brick, riddled with slats of glass from windows belonging to other apartments, other rooms. There’s no surface to stand on. No ledge to balance on. The cold wind bites at Ryan’s cheeks. It stings at the tip of his nose. Slowly, he draws his head back in, and pushes the window closed, slotting the lock into place again, and lifting the blinds back over his head until they swing, lifelessly, back against the window. 

“What’s going on?” Shane asks, still standing in his doorway.

“I saw something.” He says it differently, this time. It isn’t as playful. It isn’t as illuminated by pithy glee, or boyish delight. It’s stricken. It’s stripped bare. It’s wrought with underlying terror that punctures his words with a firm and jagged-edged kind of staccato. 

Shane is silent. 

“There was somebody-... looking in my window.”

“Ryan, how is that possible? We’re forty floors in the air.”

“I know.” Ryan says, doing all that he can to keep his voice measured and slow. “It sounds insane. It sounds _ fucking _ insane. I want to to be bullshit, dude. I want that _ so badly _ right now. But, I saw somebody. They had eyes like-... like an owl, or a cat, when you shine a light in their eyes.”

“The reflection-..?” Shane asks, lifting a hand to gesture idly toward his downturned eyes. 

“Yeah. Like that.” Ryan nods. He swallows, throat feeling dry. “They were staring at me. Looking at me right through the gaps in my blinds. They were just-... staring at me, like I was something to eat. Or something to play with. I don’t fucking know, dude. I don’t know. It didn’t even hit me-... how is that possible? How is that _ fucking _ possible?” His voice breaks, it cracks, hysterical.

Shane takes three quick steps towards him. He reaches out, and his long-fingered hands close around each of Ryan’s shoulders. Warm, weighted, soothing. 

“Hey, man. Hey.” He says, quietly, cutting off Ryan’s terror-born babbling. “It’s okay. It’s gone, right? Whatever it is, it’s gone now. Look out the window.” 

It’s a request, and not a question. Ryan obliges him. He looks back toward the window, to the place above his dresser where he’d seen the silhouette. 

There’s nothing there, now. Only the neighbouring skyscraper with its speckled lights, glittering against the glitzy night sky like a pillar in the darkness.

“What do you see?”

“Just-... the fucking eyesore next door.”

“See? It’s gone, isn’t it?”

“Fuck.” Ryan lifts his hands, he buries his face into his palms. They are still shaking. _ He _ is still shaking.

“Do you want to sleep in my room again tonight?” Shane offers, casting it between them as thoughtlessly as he would when asking Ryan for a coffee, when asking Ryan to pass him a book, a salt-shaker, a spare teaspoon. 

Ryan’s eyes remain closed. His hands remain over his face. He knows the answer long before he utters it aloud.

“Yeah. If-... if that’s okay.”

“Will it make you feel better?”

“Mm.” His hands come away. He skims the tips of his fingertips against the cusp of his nose, and he avoids Shane’s gaze. “Being here is-... manageable when I’m close to you. I don’t feel so scared when I’m close to you. I don’t know what that means.”

He sees Shane’s frown deepen out of the corner of his eye. He sees his gaze wander. He feels his fingers tighten upon the curves of his shoulders. 

“It means you trust me.” Shane says, quietly. “Now, come on. It’s late, and I have work in the morning.” Slowly, his hands rescind. “Let’s go to bed.” 

.xx.

The sun rises slowly in the middle of winter. It rises as if it is as reluctant to greet the cold morning light as the inhabitants of the city upon which it shines. Light trickles in through the high-reaching buildings in great shafts of gold that struggle to permeate the thick morning fog until a hazy, blue-hued glow dapples across the city, and peeks in through Shane’s blinds early on Friday morning. 

The bedsheets rustle, drawing Ryan back into awareness. There is an arm slung carelessly along the sway of his waist, with two fingers notched just above the dip of his navel, tangled in the folded and rumpled fabric of his shirt, half-hiked beneath his hip. 

Slowly, they recede, drawing back along his flesh like the rush of a receding tide, dragging as they go, pulling along the sand, whisking toward the dip of Ryan’s spine, until they slither away entirely, leaving his skin cold. 

Unthinkingly, he rolls over. He reaches out, chasing after them, seeking them like a toddler unwilling to say goodbye to his first summer. He catches them just as Shane rises from the edge of the bed, and he holds on. 

“Stay.” He mumbles, words muffled by the pillow beneath him. He struggles to pry open one eye, and he looks up at Shane. 

He looks oddly energised, downturned eyes sharp and aware, bright and awake- despite the dishevelled mess of dark hair atop his head, and the rumpled shirt still clad upon his frame. His lips quirk upwards into a too-fond smile as Ryan’s grip draws lax, and he releases him. 

“I can’t.” He says, voice quiet. “I’ve got bills to pay, Bergara. I’ll be back before six. Go back to sleep.” 

He hesitates, there-- reaching out for Ryan with uncertain fingertips, like he wants to reach down, like he wants to card them through Ryan’s unruly curls, to smooth them down, to soothe him into forgetting the strangeness of the night before. Instead, he does nothing. He turns away from the bed, and rifles through his wardrobe for a clean shirt and a fresh pair of slacks, before disappearing into the bathroom. 

Ryan’s eyes fall closed, and sleep pulls him under just as swiftly. It’s his day off. He’s allowed to sleep in. 

.xx.

He wakes to his phone buzzing a little after two in the afternoon. 

The sun shines in through the window in bold and golden stripes with the punctured brightness of midday, illuminating Shane’s room with a fresh kind of vibrancy Ryan isn’t used to seeing on this side of the apartment. He’s normally awake by this time, and nearing the end of his shift at the cafe. He doesn’t remember the last time he slept until two in the afternoon. He thinks it has to have been in his sophomore year in college, when drinking was still a novelty, and the groggy addition of a hangover was crippling enough to bind him to his bed for the majority of the day.

It doesn’t _ feel _ good. His day feels wasted, and yet-- he still feels tired.

Reluctantly, he peels himself out of Shane’s bed. He fishes his phone out from the rumpled duvet, and retrieves one of the hoodies discarded on the floor by the end of Shane’s bed. He pulls it haphazardly on as he navigates clumsily out of the bedroom, and wanders down the length of the hall toward the livingroom, pulling the fabric down and over his chest, and smoothing it down with careful palms. 

It’s a navy-blue sweater with a loose hood and sleeves made for arms much longer than his. The ribbed sleeves fall over his hands entirely until he has to pull the sleeves up just to free his hands. The word ‘SORRY’ is printed in bold, white letters across the front, and Ryan decides then and there that he is keeping this sweatshirt; even if it means fighting Shane for it. 

He rouses his phone as he drifts into the kitchen, blinking at the three unread texts waiting for him there. Two are from Shane. 

_ S: How are you feeling today? Remember no coffee! _

_ S: I’m thinking steak and potatoes for dinner. Maybe some iron will do you some good. _

Ryan grins to himself, unlocks his phone, and taps out a reply. 

_ R: im not anemic, ur just an asshole. im feeling ok. Still tired. _

He exits out of his messaging app, and scrolls over to his phone’s camera function. He rotates the camera to face him, and draws it back to snap a careless photo of his sleep-addled features, churned hair, and borrowed jumper in the midst of the kitchen. Nodding to himself, he sends the text off to Shane. 

_ R: thx for the jumper _

Immediately, the bubble indicating that Shane is typing pops up. It lingers, the hovering dots fluttering and bouncing until Ryan grows impatient, and scrolls to his other unread message. It’s from a number that isn’t saved into his phone. He leans against the edge of the kitchen counter as he reads it. 

_ #: Hello Ryan. I am Father Thomas’s assistant. We had a booking cancel today and are free for a visitation consultation at 4pm. Please let us know if this is appropriate and forward us your address ASAP. Thank you. Adrian. _

“Shit.” Ryan’s brows draw up. 

He’s quick to tap out his reply. It’s cutting it close to when Shane arrives home after work, but it’s a time slot Ryan is willing to chance if it means avoiding a repeat of the night before. He sends their address off, confirming the time readily. 

He navigates back to his conversation with Shane. The typing indicator drifts away. Ryan stares at it, as if waiting for it to pop up, or for a message to fly in to greet him. But, he has no such luck. 

“Whatever.” He mutters. “I’ll clean instead.” 

.xx.

His phone remains in his pocket as he hurries through their apartment; sweeping the floors, mopping the bathroom floor, running their comically small vacuum cleaner over the thatched carpet in the livingroom, and scrubbing down the kitchen island table with a wet sponge and far too many bubbles. The scent of dishwashing liquid and cologne hangs in the air like a perfume as Ryan bustles about, bringing order back into their apartment until it looks fit for visitors.

He’s piling the last few dishes into the washer when his phone buzzes again. He almost drops the bowl in his grip as he shifts it into his left hand so that his right might dip into the folds of his pocket to fish his phone free. There’s a message there from Shane. 

_ S: It looks better on you. _

_ S: I’d insist that we trade, but your clothes are made for miniature-humans. _

_ S: That would be ridiculous. _

Ryan grins to himself. He shakes his head ruefully, and responds to Shane with the cry-laughing emoji for good measure, before swiftly stashing his phone back into his pocket as he eases the dishwasher closed. 

He situates himself on the couch, the footage from the night they’d used the ouija board open on his video player while he considers the implications of showing it to the priest when he comes by. There’s a good chance it’ll be shrugged off as nothing, a good chance that it’ll be written off as fake, photoshopped or set-up. Ghost-hunters on television and in movies fake evidence all the time. It’s one of the most reprehensible and difficult aspects of those shows, Ryan thinks. Even if there is real evidence caught on tape, the vast majority of viewers (and people like Shane) will discount it at a glance as being set-up for the sake of virality. It’s a fair assumption. Ryan - despite his vehemence in his belief - is quick to scrutinise any footage he sees on YouTube. All of it could be very easily faked. During times like those, a certain amount of skepticism is vital. 

He wants to post it online. He wants to see what others think. He wishes there was some way that he could convey that he is trustworthy. That this really happened - that there wasn’t a string off-screen that pushed or pulled the planchette, that it wasn’t him nor Shane- but who would believe that? 

The video is edited and cut-together, spliced in with cards of text explaining their situation, the state of the apartment, and what Reggie had confided in him about Esther to offer context. The video in total is only five minutes long-- with the majority of it being his and Shane’s set-up, and Ryan’s subsequent meltdown after the planchette had moved. The footage is hard to see at times, grainy and pixelated in parts thanks to the darkness, despite how Ryan had bumped up the vibrancy as best as iMovie allowed him. 

He’s jittery. His nerves are on end. His phone is sitting by his thigh upon the couch, with the reflection of Shane’s analog clock from upon the wall reflected off its glossy screen. It’s ten minutes to four and Ryan doesn’t know _ how _ he is going to hold himself together during the Father’s visit. 

Time feels as if it crawls at a snail’s pace. He eases his laptop from his legs, and starts pacing loose rings around the living room instead. He picks up Shane’s copy of _ Good Omens _ that had been left sitting on the coffee table. Yet, despite how hard he tries to focus on the words printed on the page, his thoughts are a million miles away. He isn’t taking them in. He might as well be staring at a point on the wall, despite how his gaze traces line after line. 

He drops it back onto the couch, and glances at the time again. It’s fifteen minutes past four, and the Father is late. 

Ryan wonders if that counts as blasphemy. 

But, before he has the chance to consider it too deeply, there is a polite knock at the door; two gentle raps that could have easily been drowned out by the trundling churn of the dishwasher. His gaze snaps up, and he hurries across the living room, and into the hallway. He slides to a halt, socks giving him traction against the glossy floorboards, and he reaches out to turn the lock and whisk the door open. 

Father Thomas stands there in a plain black button-up shirt, with every notch fastened up to his neck. The shirt has been tucked neatly into a pair of plain black slacks, with an impressive pair of glossy monk shoes to finish his look. He looks like he did in the pictures; with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a clean-shaven jaw that is strong and chiselled, with a small nose, and blue eyes that are spaced a little too far apart. His smile is friendly as it greets Ryan. It presses dimples into his cheeks, it wrinkles the corners of his eyes. He looks like a man more suited to standing behind a barbecue at a children’s birthday party than a priest investigating a probable haunting. There’s a bible clasped in his left hand, and his right hand extends forwards to shake Ryan’s own. 

“Ryan, it’s good to meet you. Please forgive our lateness.” 

At the word ‘our’, Ryan’s gaze flits to the woman behind Thomas. She is small, mousey, with wild brown curls tied into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her features are kindly, comely, sweet-natured and nurturing. She looks to be a similar age to the Father; and she is dressed like an elementary school teacher; in a long pleated tartan skirt, and a button-up blouse with a bow at the collar. 

“Yeah. It’s totally fine, dude. Don’t even worry about it.” Ryan blurts out, reaching out to give Father Thomas’s hand a firm shake. “It’s good to meet you. Come in, come in.” 

He pushes the door open wider, and Thomas steps through - his gaze lifting to take in his surroundings as he moves into the living room, his steps deliberate and slow; as if he’s assessing everything, as if he’s testing his new surroundings, drinking them in with the self-same pliant curiosity as a curator in an art gallery. The woman follows closely behind him, a notebook and bullet point pen clutched in her hands. 

“This is Nancy.” He says, gaze still wandering. “She’s a dear friend of mine, and a confidant. We’ve visited many houses together.” 

“Oh. It’s good to meet you, too.” Ryan steps forwards after shutting the front door, and he reaches out to offer Nancy his hand. 

She smiles brightly at him as she accepts it, and offers it a surprisingly firm shake. 

“How, uh-..” Ryan releases her hand, attention moving between the two strangers. “How does this stuff usually go?”

“Well..” Father Thomas looks to Nancy, and then to Ryan. His smile returns, and it is warm enough, reassuring enough that it sets Ryan at ease. He wonders, for a moment, if inviting them here had been an overreaction. “You had mentioned in your call that you’ve had several incidents occur during your time living here, is that right?”

“Yeah. Uh-.. more since I called. There’s-... more has happened.” He stammers out.

“Right.” The Father’s gaze strays to Nancy. 

She flips open the notebook, and at once her pen is skittering across the page, poised elegantly in her right hand. 

“Is it all right if we have a bit of a wander?” Father Thomas asks. 

“Yeah, of course. There’s not many rooms. It’s a small place, and uh-... m-my roommate isn’t home yet, but you can look in his room, still. He won’t mind.”

He hadn’t even told Shane they were coming. He had considered it, but any time he thought too deeply upon it, he remembered every time Shane had dismissed his worries, every time he’d discounted them as the wind, or written them off as the building simply being old. His reaction to a priest and his assistant assessing the state of the apartment wouldn’t be positive, and Ryan knew it. They’d be in-and-out before it hit five-thirty. Shane never had to know. 

Father Thomas starts silently down the hallway, seemingly sparing very little thought to the livingroom. His steps slow as he reaches the creaking floorboards between their bedrooms, and Ryan trails anxiously after him. Nancy drifts behind them, the heels of her Mary Jane’s clicking lightly against the floorboards. 

“What exactly did you experience here, Ryan?” He asks, voice gentle. 

“Um-... well. A lot of things. I saw-... this figure outside my window just a day ago. I was standing here-..” He squeezes past Nancy to shuffle to the doorway of the bathroom, and he stands in the exact spot he’d lingered in the night before, with his hand poised against the frame, reaching for the switch. “...-and I saw something there. Like a-... figure. Like somebody was standing outside my window, and looking in. They were just a silhouette. I couldn’t make out any features except for their eyes.”

“What were their eyes like?” The Father asks, moving to gently nudge Ryan from the doorway so that he might mirror the poise, and follow Ryan’s gaze out to the window, of which he has a perfect vantage point from the bathroom door. 

“They were reflective. Y’know-... like how a cat or a dog’s eyes are when you look at them under the right light.”

Nancy’s pen resumes moving, scribbling looping script across the sallow pages of her spiral notebook as Ryan speaks. He wonders if that’s a bad sign. 

“Did you see anything else?”

“No. I looked away for a second. When I looked back, they were gone.”

Father Thomas lets out a thoughtful sound. He drifts forwards, easing between Nancy and Ryan and moving into his bedroom instead. He starts toward the window, and eases Ryan’s dusty curtains out of the way. He shifts the blinds thoughtfully, and then utters in a very quiet voice..

“We are too high for a peeping tom, Nancy.” 

She nods, her pen still darting across the page. 

“Have you experienced any nightmares?” 

“Yes.” Ryan says, following him into his bedroom. “I got sleep paralysis for the first time a couple weeks back, too. I’ve never had it before.”

“What did you see?” 

“A figure. It was too long, and too tall to be human. It was reaching out for me. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew it was hungry.”

“Hungry.” Father Thomas moves to the end of his bed. He leans forwards to rest his free hand against the bedframe jutting upwards from the foot of his mattress.

“I-... once saw a shadow, too. So, when my door is shut, the light from the bathroom turns on sometimes, and when someone is standing between my room and the bathroom, obviously, I can see when they obstruct the light. I saw something, and when I went to open the door to look, there wasn’t anybody there.”

Father Thomas is quiet. His expression is taut, impassive, difficult to discern but deeply introspective nevertheless. 

“But my landlord came over a couple weeks ago, to fix the fuze because it blew,” and he leaves out the specifics of that incident. “He told me that a woman had died here. That her boyfriend had tossed her out a window, so Shane and I used a ouija board--”

“You used a ouija board?” Father Thomas’s attention drifts over to him, and Ryan feels distinctly like a deer caught in the headlights of an incoming vehicle. 

“Yeah, I-I just wanted to know what it wanted-...”

“That’s not a toy.” The Father straightens from the end of his bed. “That’s a conjuring tool. That isn’t a game. _ This _ isn’t a game.” 

He shoulders cooly past Ryan, who feels distinctly like a misbehaving student being scolded by his kindergarten teacher. He’s half expecting Father Thomas to murmur a ‘I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed’ to further drive his point home. 

“This isn’t a ghost that you are dealing with.” He says, voice drifting toward Ryan from the hallway. “May I look inside your roommates room?”

Hurriedly, Ryan starts after him, moving into the hallway and stepping upon that creaking floorboard that squeaks beneath his weight. He stops himself from flinching. 

“Yeah. It might be messy, so-..” 

Father Thomas is standing outside Shane’s closed door. His head is tipped forwards. His eyes are closed. His lips are downturned at the corners. He’s holding onto the bible clutched to his chest in a vice-like grip. His knuckles are white, with tendons standing out against his flesh. 

Nancy moves in behind him, her steps quick, marked by the gentle billow of her skirts. She reaches up to trace two fingers carefully along the sway of Father Thomas’s spine, uttering a prayer too quiet for Ryan to make out from the doorway of his bedroom.

It feels like something he isn’t meant to be seeing, It feels personal -- a deeply private moment between two people that he shouldn’t be here to witness. He considers backing into his bedroom, and politely shutting the door, but before he can; Father Thomas speaks. 

“I can feel it. It isn’t here. But, I can feel it.” 

Slowly, his eyes draw open. He reaches out, and he nudges open Shane’s door, pressing it open just enough to look inside his room. Ryan notices that he’s careful not to cross the threshold inside. 

“What does that mean?” He asks, cautiously. 

“This room. It’s full of-... _ vile _ energy. Can you not feel it?” His attention turns to Nancy, who offers a grim nod by way of response. 

“What do you mean by that?” Ryan presses, wandering slowly down the hallway to linger behind the priest and his assistant. “Is there a ghost in there or something?”

“No. This isn’t a ghost.”

“What is it, then?”

Nancy looks up at him, her eyes owlish and wide, lips pursed, expression wrought with veiled urgency as she leans in close to whisper to him. 

“It’s a demon.”

.xx.

The story is flimsy and Ryan isn’t even certain of just how much of it that he believes. Father Thomas had insisted on cleansing the room, and purifying the energies that lingered inside it to make way for a positive influence. Ryan had hovered awkwardly in the doorway, battling with a mess of internal guilt and mortification while the priest had uttered a series of complex prayers and orders, dispelling the entity, commanding it to leave in a long string of events that felt theatrical and over-dramatic. Even Ryan had struggled to keep his expression calm. Afterwards, they had sat with him in the living room to explain what they believed was happening in the confines of the apartment. Nancy’s pen never once stops moving across the thatched pages of her scuffed notepad, her eyes as wide as saucers, looking gravely at the priest beside her as if he’s the core of her universe. 

“How do demons even-... decide to move in to places?”

“They are invited.” Father Thomas tells him, expression as sincere as if this were a political debate, and not an advice session for wrangling _ demons. _ “That’s why I had to command it to leave, you see.”

“Yeah. Got that. Uh-..”

“If there is anything you must take from this, it is never to open a line of communication with them. Never give them the opportunity. Never open that door. Do nothing to invite them in. If you do that, then you won’t have any more problems.”

“So-... all the weird shit that’s been happening, it should stop now, right?”

“In theory.” The priest nods. “Yes.” 

“How did you know it was a demon, though? I thought-... with all that had happened, it felt like it was a ghost.”

“Demons feed off energies. It’s entirely possible that the story that was told to you was factual. Traumatic events and tragic experiences have a tendency to draw malevolence. A demon may have attached itself to this apartment due to what happened here. They feed off the negative energies; guilt, fear, loss, anger, jealousy, greed. I could feel it when I first arrived. It only grew stronger as I came deeper inside, until it might have been written on the walls.”

“What’s their end goal? The demons, I mean.”

“To bring us down alongside them. Their souls are already damned. The more they are able to frighten you, upset you, anger you, or make you _ feel, _ the more they are able to feed. It brings them closer to their goal.”

Ryan nods, considering this around a deep inhale. 

“What-... should I do about all of this, then? How do I move forward, what do I do?”

“Tell your roommate.” Father Thomas says, sternly. “If he is sleeping with a demonic entity, he ought to know. Consider taking a vacation for a few days just to get out of the house, it might encourage it to leave. Bring positive energy into your space. Do positive things, and things that bring you joy. You have done everything right so far.”

“Aside from the ouija board.” Nancy cuts in, looking up from her notebook. 

Ryan offers a nervous chuckle. Father Thomas smiles faintly; a smile that is lacking in humour. 

“Right. I can do those things.” He says, softly.

“We’ve got to get going. Nancy has to pick up her daughter from school, and I have another appointment.” Father Thomas draws to his feet, straightening up and once again offering Ryan his hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you today, Ryan. I do hope that our visit is helpful.”

“Oh-.. yeah, totally.” Ryan fumbles to his feet, and reaches out to accept the firm handshake. “Er-.. how d’you guys, uh-..”

“Nancy will email you with payment details.” Father Thomas supplies helpfully. 

“Right, of course.” He starts forwards, then - leading the both of them back to the front door that he reaches for with an unsteady hand to draw open. “It was really nice meeting you guys. It’s gonna put my mind at ease, I swear.”

He turns to the doorway, and he freezes.

Shane is standing there, his key in his hand, poised where the lock had been just a moment ago, with his work bag slung over his shoulder, dressed in his usual button-down and plain slacks, with a cable-knit cardigan drawn upon his arms. He looks at Ryan for a moment, before allowing his gaze to stray to Father Thomas and Nancy, crowded behind him. 

Ryan’s heart sinks. 

“You must be Shane.” Father Thomas smiles at him, pleasantly. He reaches out to offer Shane’s hand for a shake, a hand that Shane accepts after a moment of hesitation. It’s firm, and short. He steps back, releasing the Father’s grip, to move out of his way. 

“Hello.” He says, stiffly; expression tense and plainly _ irritated. _

Ryan bites the inside of his cheek. 

“Have a good evening, Ryan.” Nancy tells him in a hushed tone. She slips past him, and nods politely to Shane as she passes him into the hallway. Father Thomas follows behind her, his movements slower, and more nuanced. He pauses as he moves past Shane. His gaze strays back toward him, and it’s a stare that Shane meets behind the thick rims of his glasses.

Something intangible and precarious passes between them. It is there and gone again quicker than Ryan can blink, and Shane is smiling politely at the priest and his assistant as the two of them vanish down the long stretch of hall. 

Only when they are out of sight does he turn on Ryan. He reaches out to push the door open as wide as it will go with one palm, while his other hand reaches out to knot tightly in the front of Ryan’s shirt, shoving him roughly inside the doorway. 

He stumbles thoughtlessly back, breath rushing from his lungs in a long heave as Shane pushes him up against the wall by the door. It snaps shut behind him, and he looms over Ryan, veiled in the lambent shadows cast under the entranceway of their apartment, fragrant with the scent of powdered sugar and coffee, deeply familiar and utterly, utterly menacing. Even in the dark, Ryan can _ see _ the wild and vicious gleam in his eyes, staring down at him with plain _ fury. _ He’s never looked less recognizable than he does in this moment. 

“Shane--”

“What the _ fuck _ was that, Ryan?” He hisses, voice cutting and sharp. 

“I just wanted to see what they’d say. I had to know. I was scared, dude. I’m tired of being terrified.” He grasps hold of Shane’s wrist where his palm is pinned to Ryan’s chest. 

“Please.” He snaps. “You _ love _ being terrified.”

He hasn’t a response to that. He gapes up at him in the dark, feeling distinctly foolish for realising that they are a mere inch apart. He’d only need to lift onto the tips of his toes to brush his lips to Shane’s. 

He pushes that thought away, and tries to wrestle Shane’s grasp off him. 

“You invited two strangers into _ our _ home without telling me. One of which is a priest because you _ still _ think that this fucking apartment is haunted. That’s-... you invaded my privacy, Ryan.” 

..and when he utters Ryan’s name this time, his voice wavers; it lowers to a whisper that softens the blow of his accusations. It’s conflicted, bewildered and -- Ryan realises with a guilty pang -- _ hurt. _

He draws in a careful breath. It’s stuttered and short. He squeezes his eyes shut. His grasp on Shane’s wrist eases, his thumb drifts against the inside of his wrist. He feels the flutter of his pulse, beating as wildly as a caged bird under the pad of his thumb. 

“I’m sorry, dude.” It’s a murmur. A whisper breathed into the relative half-dark between them. It’s heavy with meaning. Weighted with sincerity. Sliced through with a plain indication of regret. 

“I’m sorry.”

He had known it wasn’t the right thing to do. His fear had spurred him into doing it anyway.

Shane breathes an exhale. It’s broken and hesitant; it gusts along the curve of Ryan’s throat, chased by the gentle sweep of his fingers as his grip eases upon his shirt. His touch draws upwards, and his fingertips steeple along the nape of Ryan’s neck. His thumb slots against the cusp of his throat, beneath the curve of his adam’s apple, and when he swallows he knows Shane must feel it. 

He leans in close, and their foreheads touch. He is simmering with dormant heat, seething and straining, shaking under the weight of Ryan’s palm as he struggles to self-soothe. 

Ryan wonders if he can hear the beat of his heart, hammering rabbit-like against the cage of his ribs, roaring between his ears, urgent and spurred with trepidation and excitement, enthralled by their proximity, and ravenous for more of it. 

“I’m sorry.” Shane breathes out, his voice as harsh as velvet rubbed backwards. “I snapped. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.” 

His head tilts. His forehead draws back, the tip of his nose nudges Ryan’s, and his lips are only a breath away, but he straightens, his hands lift to rest against the wall on either side of Ryan’s shoulders as he steadies himself, as he draws in a deep breath. 

“You were just scared.” 

Ryan watches him shift under the weight of the darkness. He looks tired. His features are pallid. His eyes are ringed with shadows. They are closed, and his lashes kiss the crests of his cheeks, long and dark against the pale slopes of his angular cheeks. His thin lips are parted as he draws in a slow and deliberate breath that is only let out again. 

“It didn’t help.” Ryan states after a moment, breaking the tension between them. “They told me there might be a demon living here. They cleansed your room and mine. They said it should be gone, now. But they told me to go on a vacation, and leave the apartment empty for a night.”

He pauses, calculating, watching Shane’s silhouette in the dark as his eyelids flutter.

“So I might go and sleep at my mum’s place tonight.” He draws in a breath, heart fluttering, as he whispers. “Do you want to come with me?”


	2. Chapter 2

She’s overjoyed to have them, as if Ryan could expect her to be anything else. They pile onto a train at eight in the evening with overnight bags slung over their shoulders and Shane’s lingering anxiety over seeing his mother on Monday morning. It’s a short ride, but a longer walk through the neighbourhood; and being away from their apartment feels liberating in a way that Ryan can’t name. It feels reassuring to be putting distance between them. The night is clear and quiet-- eerily reminiscent of the night they had first met. All that’s missing is Eugene’s intoxicating brand of cologne, and music too loud to think over. 

  


“How long has it been that we’ve known each other?” Ryan asks with a light turn of his head, eyes on the stars above them while they walk. 

  


“Mm? Uh… I don’t know. Five months, now?”

  


“Five months.” He echoes. “Does it feel like it’s been longer, to you?”

  


Shane is silent for a moment. The sounds of their shoes scuffing on the concrete pathway cut through the silence, lit by a far-off cicada’s song that rings, resounding and sharp, through the night. 

  


“It does.” He says, eventually. “Much longer.” 

  


“I dunno if you’re saying it like that because you can’t wait to get rid of me, or if you think it’s a good thing.” Ryan remarks, lips drawing up into a smirk. 

  


“No.” Shane tells him, emphatically. “It’s a good thing, Ryan.”

  


When the familiar white-washed house comes into view, Ryan is struck with a strange feeling of nostalgia; a longing for something that isn’t attainable any longer. The house is the same. The same house he’d grown up in. The same house he’d celebrated his highschool graduation in, the house he’d had his eighteenth birthday party in, the same house he’d learned how to drive, how to ride a bike, how to cook dynamite pho in-... 

  


Only, it’s missing something, now. A puzzle that lacks a vital finishing piece. A chess board that doesn’t have a king to compliment the queen, or any of its pawns. Incomplete. Unfinished. 

  


His steps slow. Shane falls out of pace with him, drawing ahead for a few paces before he pauses to look back at him. 

  


“Ryan?” He asks, quietly. “You good?”

  


“Yeah.” He draws from his thoughts with a small shake of his head. “Yeah. I’m good.” 

  


“We can get a hotel if-... if you’re-”

  


“I’m fine, dude.” 

  


Ryan presses past him, and starts on the stone paving that leads him up to the too-familiar porch, cluttered with his mum’s marigolds that are flourishing despite the cold sting of winter. His gaze strays to them, and the deck chair nestled amidst them- where he used to sit when he waited for Ryan to walk home from school.

  


A fresh sting of loss thrums through him. He closes his eyes, tightly. He reaches up, and stiffly - he knocks on the front door with three sharp raps. 

  


A lengthy pause follows. He hears rustling. He hears hasty footsteps. He sees the hallway light turn on behind the door, and it swings open a moment later. 

  


His mum is there, a short and slender woman with a short bob of dark hair, her comely features drawn into a pleased smile as she lifts her arms, and throws them around Ryan’s broad shoulders. 

  


“Oh! You’re here, you’re here!” She coos, patting the back of his head as he wraps his arms around her in turn. It feels like a band-aid, a brief swab of salve to dampen the edges of his hurt. She smells familiar. She feels familiar. 

  


She’s home. A different kind of home to the one he’s come to know with Shane.

  


At that, Ryan draws back - blinking the dampness back from his eyes. “Uh, mum; this is Shane, he’s my roommate. Shane, this is my mum.”

  


“Hello Mrs. Bergara.” Shane nods, and offers a hand out to shake hers, but - laughing, she bats it away, pushing past Ryan to envelope Shane in a hug just as warm and eager as the one she’d given to her son. 

  


Shane’s eyes widen, and he looks up, and at Ryan with a look of plain surprise. Ryan just grins, and offers him a light shrug. 

  


“Oh, please! Call me Hana.” 

  


“H-Hana? Oh-...”

  


She gives him a squeeze, and then she releases him. She bustles back inside the house, and waves for the two of them to follow her inside, where it is warm, and welcoming, and adorned with the trappings of Ryan’s childhood. He closes the door after Shane, carefully easing his backpack from his shoulders.

  


“Have you boys had dinner already?”

  


“Uh, yeah- we have. It’s okay, mum. You don’t gotta do anything.”

  


“Oh, but I made pho!” 

  


“It’s fine. We can have it for lunch tomorrow.” Ryan reassures. 

  


Audibly, she clicks her tongue. “Can I make tea?”

  


Shane is grinning beside him, Ryan can tell. 

  


“Yeah. I guess tea’s fine.” 

  


He tips his head to wordlessly indicate for Shane to follow him as they start down the narrow hallway where it opens into the kitchen. 

  


The house is distinctly old, something that had been built in the seventies and changed very little after that time. It’s floors are solid and wooden, and its walls are an off-cream, a colour that had been trendy when his parents had purchased it, but one that’s woefully out of style, now. The walls are adorned with pictures of Ryan and his brother-- some of them in school uniforms, in graduation gowns, with trophies and medals and sports memorabilia. Some of them with their parents, and many more of just the two of them with their mother. Speckled amidst the other photos are crucifixes, iconographic artworks of various saints Ryan couldn’t name, and rosaries. The lone shelf on the wall in the kitchen is crammed full of recipe books of various cuisines- everything from Greek to Vietnamese, with a bible crammed into the middle, and a photo of Ryan and his brother on either side, like bookends. 

  


It’s plain that Hana is a _very_ proud mother. 

  


“Go into the living room. I’ll bring it out.” She insists, waving them on through the kitchen, and into the livingroom. 

  


It’s ostensibly decorated with a bookshelf against the far wall, a wide television by the backyard door, and a series of leather couches bracketing it. There’s a dining table behind them, adjoining onwards to the kitchen. The walls here are just as cluttered and complex- and Shane takes in the photos with a faint smile and a wide-eyed look of wonder. 

  


He pauses by one such photo of Ryan feeding a Kangaroo while looking utterly terrified, and raises his eyebrows inquisitively. 

  


“We visited a petting zoo.” Ryan mutters. 

  


Shane grins. “You were a cute kid.” He murmurs. “What happened?”

  


Ryan laughs. “Shut up, man.”

  


“Am I going to get to see your bedroom?” He asks, inspecting each photographs upon the walls with interest. 

  


“I guess? I know she hasn’t changed it since I moved out.”

  


“Oh, perfect.” Shane muses. 

  


“Why do you wanna see it? It’s just a room.”

  


“I get a glimpse into the Bergmeister when he was just a teenager! That’s the best and most perverted time of our lives. It’ll be fantastic.”

  


Again, Ryan laughs. “Then maybe I won’t let you see it! You’re sleeping in Jake’s room, anyway.” He reaches out to give Shane’s shoulder a playful shove. 

  


His mum bustles back into the room, holding a porcelain teapot in one hand, with three mugs stacked up in the other. 

  


“Sit, sit, sit, sit!” she insists, setting the pot and the mugs down on the coffee table as Shane and Ryan carefully take a seat upon the leather couch, perched close enough that their knees touch. It sends a sharp bolt of warmth through Ryan’s veins. He tries to ignore it. 

  


“I’ve heard so much about you, Shane.” She says, sitting on the armchair opposite them, her smile wide. “Ryan has had so much to say about this new friend. Isn’t it nice? That you have this close friend you only now met?” She asks, nodding at Ryan until he reciprocates. “At a party, wasn’t it?”

  


“Yeah. We had a lot of friends in common. One of them knew that Shane was looking for a roommate, and when I said I needed one, he introduced us.”

  


“And it’s been working?” She looks at Shane, this time; so Ryan holds his tongue. 

  


“Oh, yes! Ryan is-... Ryan’s great.”

  


“Does he cook for you?”

  


“Hey--!” Ryan cuts in.

  


Shane laughs. “Almost never. I think he tried to make toast one morning. He set off the fire alarm in the hallway. So, I banished him from the kitchen.”

  


She clicks her tongue, and looks at Ryan with a stern frown. 

  


“It was a new toaster!” Ryan insists. “I didn’t know how strong it was! I have to do test-runs first to see how intense the heat is before I know how high to put the settings!”

  


“You bumped the setting up to its maximum. Of course it’s going to burn at that point, Ryan. If you wanted to test it, you start at the lowest setting and you work your way up.”

  


“Alright, whatever, dude.” Ryan leans over, knocking his shoulder into Shane’s. “Agree to disagree.”

  


“On common sense?”

  


“Yeah. Fuck your common sense.”

  


“Ryan!” His mum cuts in.

  


“‘Fuck your common sense’. Ryan Bergara, twenty-nineteen.”

  


Ryan and his mother both laugh, brightly. 

  


.xx.  


  


They drink tea and talk over reruns of _That_ _70_’s _Show_ that air in the background on his mum’s tinny television set. None of them are watching it, really- and it feels like Hana takes a shine to Shane almost immediately. She dotes on him, asks him questions about Ryan’s housekeeping habits, his work ethic, how often he washes his underwear, and if he’s ever watched Shane sleep (like he used to watch her when he was very little). She delights in his stories and laughs at his jokes, and Ryan can’t tell if Shane is just good at meeting parental figures, or if the two of them are genuinely meant to be friends. 

  


It’s ten minutes to midnight when Shane excuses himself to sleep. Ryan shows him into Jake’s room, which is stripped bare and vacant; save for a single bed with white bedsheets, and a simple bedside table facing an empty wardrobe. Shane vanishes inside with a mumbled thanks, looking paler than normal. 

  


So, Ryan returns to the livingroom and he sits next to Hana upon the couch, nestled in close - in a place he hasn’t sat in many, many years. He went through the stereotypical teenage phase of not wanting to be close with his parents, and he came to regret it only a handful of years later when one parent was torn from him. She reaches over to slide an arm around his broader shoulders, and he slouches down on the couch to nestle comfortably into her side. He smells her perfume-- sweetened lavender and honey -- and it brings with it a flood of familiar memories. He closes his eyes, and he lets them wash over him; thinking back to their sun-blasted front porch, their rickety windows, the loose thread in his knitted blue sweater that he’d gnaw on, pancakes on sunday mornings that were always burned on one side, and pop-tarts that set off the fire alarm despite how often Jake would reassure him they were fine. All of them are framed or bookended by his dad; by his wrinkled smiles and his quiet laughter. 

  


Ryan opens his eyes again, and they were wet with withheld tears. 

  


“You’re lucky that you have this.” She says, after a moment. Ryan can feel the methodical beat of her heart under his shoulder. He half-turns his head, a frown settled upon his brow, and she elaborates. “Good friends are hard to come by.”

  


“I know.” Ryan murmurs. 

  


“He really cares about you. When he talks to you-...” She laughs. It is a quiet and breathless sound. “...-it is like there is nobody else in the room.”

  


She shifts against him, and Ryan lowers his gaze to his hands. 

  


“Does he have a girlfriend?” 

  


“Mum-..” Ryan sits up, drawing away with a coarse laugh. 

  


“I am just asking!” She adds, holding up both of her hands as if in surrender. “Not because I am interested, no. I’m not cheeky. I mean for you.”

  


“What are you talking about?” Ryan asks, flatly. 

  


“I don’t know.” She drops her hands to her lap, and her fingers lace together. “I don’t know what I am talking about. I am just-... I am happy that you have this friendship. I will love you no matter what.” 

  


Another frown creases between Ryan’s brows, and he’s too tired to muddle through the fragmented pieces of reassurance that she offers him. He skims a hand tiredly through his cropped-short hair, and he huffs out another laugh. 

  


“I don’t really see how Shane having a girlfriend will be good for me, but-... thanks, I guess? Yeah. Thanks mum.” He leans over, he lifts his chin, he presses a kiss into the cusp of her brow. “I love you too, and I’m gonna go to bed. I’m tired as shit.”

  


He draws back, and she pats at his arm. 

  


“Don’t swear in this house.” She says, and laughing - Ryan stands from the couch. 

  


He brushes his teeth, he changes, and he washes his face before wandering into his bedroom.

  


It’s exactly as he’d left it. Unlike Jake, he’d left a good portion of his childhood memorabilia still safely inside the confines of his bedroom. It felt wrong to bring it to his college dorms, where parties were a regular occurrence and objects would be routinely destroyed. Here, lit by the moonlight flowing in through the lone window against the far wall, it feels like a time machine. 

  


He feels twelve again, with his Lakers jersey bolted to the wall, something he’d begged his dad to do when he was nine. His bookshelf is crammed full of Goosebumps volumes, books he’d once decided to enthusiastically collect - he’s sure he’s woefully behind by now. There are trophies from basketball leagues, soccer games, baseball and long-jump. Athletics Ryan had excelled at once upon a time; while he struggles nowadays just to drag himself into the gym. The same crosshatched rug still blankets his floor, between his desk and his bed, thatched and faded from age. Photos clutter the desk, with friends he hasn’t spoken to since highschool, with Jake when they were both very little, with his mum- and one with his dad, perched on the fraying deck in their backyard, holding a beer in one hand, while his other clutches Ryan close to his side. 

  


He reaches out for the photo. He drifts two fingers along its frame, along the outside of his shoulder, where the sunlight shines into the camera lens with a kaleidoscopic flare. It washes out part of his smile, but it endures nonetheless. Like it always did. Like it always has. 

  


Ryan exhales. His hand withdraws. He skates a palm over his parted lips, and spares a lingering look at his bed - perfectly made with a folded bath towel set neatly upon it. Hana still knows his routine, knows he likes to shower in the mornings. 

  


But, he turns upon his heel- as if spurred by the sight of the towel, the sight of his single, lonely bed illuminated in silver by the moon. 

  


The door opens soundlessly, and Ryan creeps down the hall, avoiding the part of the floorboards that he knows creak - he’d crept into Jake’s room after lights-out many nights when he was younger. He could map the topography this house with a blindfold on by now. 

  


The door is open ever so slightly, and Ryan pushes it open just wide enough to slip inside, and into the darkness. 

  


“Shane?” He whispers, gently. 

  


“Mmh--?” There’s movement from the far corner of the room. 

  


“You awake?”

  


“No.”

  


The curtain has been drawn shut over the window, bathing the room in relative blackness until Ryan has to carefully navigate his way towards the bed, precariously stepping over Shane’s overnight bag until he reaches the edge of the bed. He fumbles against the bedsheets until he can pull them back. He can just barely make out Shane’s silhouette in the dark, but he sees him lift a lazy arm to help hold the sheets aloft so that Ryan might clamber under them. 

  


He slips in as carefully as he can, slotting himself into the single bed alongside Shane. They’re pressed in close quarters, and Shane feels almost uncomfortably warm in this proximity. Ryan peers up at him as that arm lowers, letting down the blankets again. His splayed fingers settle against the cusp of Ryan’s ribcage, fingertips fitting in the grooves between them as he tugs him closer until they’re all but sharing the same air. He tucks his chin atop Ryan’s head. He places a hand on Shane’s chest. He feels the slow beat of his heart, and the heat utterly radiating from him. 

  


“Are you okay, dude? You’re really hot.”

  


“Mmf..” He doesn’t have to look up to know that Shane is grinning. “Thanks, man.”

  


“No. I mean-... you feel feverish.”

  


“Don’t worry ‘bout it. Just go to sleep.” 

  


He holds still, listening to the slow and methodical rhythm of Shane’s breathing, eloquently laced with the gentle beat of his heart, thrumming like a beat under Ryan’s palm. His warmth is everywhere, snaking beneath Ryan’s skin from all the points that they touch until he feels as though he’s on fire. 

  


Somewhere along the way, he falls asleep, intertwined so intricately with Shane that he doesn’t know where he ends, and Shane begins. 

  


He dreams of faceless figures that tower over him, with features he can’t define, features that are somehow beyond his comprehension, morphed and addled beyond recognition, something so abominable and wretched that his subconscious doesn’t know how to perceive them, so it doesn’t. He doesn’t. 

  


For the first time since his dreams started, he doesn’t feel afraid of this strange and faceless giant. 

  


.xx.  


  


The trip home is arduous and lengthy. The city whips past them outside the windows of the train in the early hours of the afternoon on Saturday. The sun winks at them in shafts through the thick and fluffy clouds half-blanketing the skyline in worn patches, merry and vibrant and filled with empty promises of a safe and bright apartment tucked within the business district of the city’s center. 

  


Shane dozes beside him while Ryan slides the glossy red beads of one of his liberated rosaries taken from the hallway of his family home between his fingers, pressing the crucifix adorned upon its end into his palm until it leaves raised-red welts of its outline against his skin. It helps pass the time, he’s too distracted for music, too listless for conversation.

  


When they’re nine stops from their home, Shane lifts his head, looking worn, tired, with deep purple rings under his eyes. He takes some time to come back to himself, but once he does - he points an unsteady hand at the rosary. 

  


“Did you steal from your mum?”

  


Ryan grins. “Nah.” He considers. “Wait-... did I?”

  


“I think you did.”

  


“Nah. She’ll understand. She’s got like twenty of these, anyway.”

  


“What’s with that?” Shane asks, reaching for his backpack and hauling it onto the vacant seat beside him. 

  


“I dunno. My dad used to use them. He told me you’d say a prayer for every bead. He used to swing them, like this-..” Ryan demonstrates, sliding one bead down, twirling the twine about his index finger until the remaining beads drape along the inside of his palm, where he might slide a new bead between his forefinger and thumb. “...-I liked listening to it. He didn’t pray out loud, but he’d swing them like that. It was relaxing, in a weird way.”

  


“I didn’t-... mean that.” Shane admits, fishing out his water bottle. “I mean, it’s a cool thing, admittedly. But, I didn’t know your parents were that devout.”

  


“They used to be.” Ryan admits, shrugging a shoulder dismissively. “Mum kind of-... fell off the wagon a bit after dad got sick. The house sometimes feels like-...” His voice catches at the back of his throat. He clears it, forcefully - as if that might help the words leave him easier. “It’s like she’s waiting for him to come back home, like he’s out on a long trip. He used to get frustrated when we moved his things around. So-...” He trails off, and Shane is nodding. 

  


“It’s hard to hold on to faith after it’s been shaken so completely.” His voice is unfathomably gentle. “You, uh-.. You got work tomorrow, right?”

  


Ryan is grateful for the shift in subject.

  


“Yeah. I’ll be on for Monday as well. That’s when your mum’s in town, right?”

  


“Yeah. She lands early.”

  


“You gonna be better by then?” Ryan asks, peering skeptically at him while their carriage rocks lullaby-like along the rails. “You really should’ve seen a doctor before we left, dude. You look pale as fuck, which is really worrying for you, since you already look like death.”

  


Shane flaps a large hand. “I’m fine. It’s a head-cold. I’ll sleep it off and be fine in the morning.” 

  


.xx.  


  


The apartment looks exactly like it had when they had left. 

  


Sun winks in at them through the broad balcony doors, shifting the curtains with the lambent breeze as it filters inside, pleasantly cool and carrying the lukewarm scent of burnt honey and marigolds from somewhere far below them. Dust floats in slow motes through the golden pools of light, merry and languid and entirely ill-suited for hosting a demon, Ryan thinks bitterly. 

  


He trails down the hallway after Shane, steps faltering along that creaking floorboard, listening, searching, feeling, as though he might feel the presence of something unseen, or the absence of something greater. 

  


But, he cannot feel anything. 

  


Ryan moves into his room, and he stops in the doorway- staring out the window where he’d seen that silhouette; but now, he can only see the distant skyline, hazy and blue-hued, a commercial paradise bookended by suburban bliss, and blanketed by a thin cast of clouds, and tattered veils of golden sunlight. 

  


It’s still, and quiet - even when he backs up to stand in the bathroom doorway instead, gaze still fixed upon the point between the first few slats in his blinds where that vacant and vile gaze had met his. He closes his eyes, he counts to ten, and he opens them again--

  


\--and meets Shane’s gaze.

  


“What are you doing?” he asks, flatly- standing with his fingers splayed, arms at his sides, pose rigid and irritated, a foot away from Ryan.

  


“Nothing.” Ryan shuffles out of his way. “I was testing something.”

  


Shane shoulders into the bathroom, and reaches for the door, easing it half-closed before he meets Ryan’s gaze. 

  


“Is this more ghost shit?”

  


“Demon.” Ryan interjects. “It’s a demon, and I’m going to get rid of it. Unless it’s already fucked off.” He turns to look over his shoulder, glancing to his window again. 

  


“You’ve really got it out for this demon, huh?”

  


“Well, yeah! It’s a fucking demon, dude. I don’t mess with demons. I’m way too scared of them for that.”

  


There is a pause between them, a moment where Shane looks as if he is about to say something more - only he steps back, and he closes the door between them. Ryan lingers there until he hears the slow rush of water tumbling from their showerhead, and cascading into the porcelain tub - and only then does he move back into the livingroom to make himself a coffee.

  


Predictably, Shane sleeps through the remainder of their Sunday while Ryan agonises over the moral implications of posting their ouija board video onto YouTube, before biting the bullet and doing so regardless. He tries to give it an engaging thumbnail, and a clickbait-inducing title, and once it’s posted - he closes his laptop and tells himself he won’t check back on it until at least a full twenty-four hours has passed. 

  


.xx.  


  


Monday greets him with a roll of thunder and a clap of lightning. Rain pours from clouds stained such a dark shade of grey that they might as well be black. The street is a blur of streaking headlights and curved umbrella prongs. Despite the rain, the city never stalls, and he isn’t sure if he had expected it to. The cafe’s windows are partially fogged from the relative warmth inside, speckled with raindrops and dew and braken from the towering trees in the park a block over. 

  


Ryan is behind the counter, arms folded across his chest, toying with a loose thread from the neckline of his apron as he watches raindrops run in rivulets down the glass in front of him, distorting his view of the city, giving it a crosshatched, blurred, gossamer wash of grey and blue. He’s here, but his thoughts are miles away-- looming over the city where their balcony juts out over the world below, home to two miscreants and a demon neither had invited inside. 

  


He’s still thinking back to the way Shane had spoken about his mother, and the picture his words had painted. His curiosity is simmering, and he glances down at the silver watch adorned upon his wrist, crinkling his nose with an itch of distaste- it’s ten past two. They should be here by now. 

  


“S’matter?” Andrew says, a pair of silver prongs held aloft in his hand as he shuffles the pastries in the display. 

  


“Mmh.” Ryan glances over his shoulder, away from the half-fogged glass. “Nothing.” 

  


“I’ll take care of it when they get here.” Andrew offers him, helpfully. “We’ve been slow all day thanks to the rain. Take off your apron and sit with them for a while.”

  


“Nah. They probably won’t want me to.” Ryan shrugs, snaking a hand up to rub his idle fingers against the nape of his neck. 

  


“He’s bringing his mum here because he wants her to meet you.” Andrew tells him, sternly. “If they didn’t want to have you around, they would’ve gone someplace else. We’re in a mecca of a city, here. There’s no shortage of cafes. Plus, you guys’ve been friends for a decent chunk of time, now.”

  


“Yeah, so what? I’ve got highschool friends I’ve known for a decade and I’ve never met their parents.”

  


“Mm.” Andrew slots the prongs back onto their hanger, before reaching for the red-and-white checkered tea towel to wipe his hands. “...-but were any of them Shane?” 

  


The bell over the entranceway chimes merrily, and Ryan’s gaze is drawn away from Andrew. 

  


Shane is there, pulling the door open with a slender arm, drenched from the rain in a pea coat with its collar drawn up around the cusp of his jawline. Rainwater drips from the ends of his hair, casting across the breast of his jacket, and the floor beneath him. The tops of his cheeks are flushed a merry pink from the cold outside. His glasses are speckled with rainwater and half-fogged. He plucks them from his features, eyes crinkled, amused, laughing over the chime of the bell as he pivots around to face the woman behind him who enters shaking off a sushine-yellow umbrella. 

  


She’s buttoned into a refined jacket that wraps her frame in eloquent tartan. Her hair is blonde, short, just barely brushing her shoulders. Her features are bright and sunny, and at a glance - Ryan can see where Shane got his nose, where he got his eyes; it’s easy to see the relation between them both, but never more plainly than when they are both smiling. 

  


“Take off the apron.” Andrew draws him from his thoughts.

  


“Right.”

  


He fumbles with the tied bow at his waist, pulling it loose and slipping his head back through the loop about his neck. He stashes the apron hastily behind the counter, and hurriedly steps out from behind it to approach Shane and his mother, steps stalled as he watches Shane shrug out of his jacket, broad shoulders rolling back in a movement veiled by catlike grace. He turns to hang it upon the brass hook by the doorway, before moving to help his mother out of her own. 

  


Ryan’s heart is caught in his throat. He doesn’t know why. 

  


He hesitates behind them, unwilling to interrupt, unwilling to speak first- in case they really didn’t want his presence there. 

  


But, Shane looks over his shoulder- as if he senses him, as if he feels Ryan approach, and his smile broadens considerably. 

  


“There you are!” He turns to hang the second jacket alongside his own. “Mum, this is Ryan.”

  


She turns in a sway of blonde curls to turn her sunny smile on him, and Ryan is momentarily disarmed. He hesitates, struck dumb, and holds out a hand for her to shake. 

  


“Oh, dear, please.” She swats the hand away, and spreads her arms to pull him into a gentle and motherly embrace. “I’ve heard so much about you. I’m so pleased that my boy has a friend like you in this big city.” She draws back, and reaches up to touch her palm to Ryan’s cheek. “Aren’t you sweet.”

  


Ryan blinks at her, owlish, disbelieving-- distraught with the realisation that the only thought passing through his mind is--.. Thank god. She likes me.

  


“Thank-... thanks. I-It’s nice to meet you, too. I’ve heard a lot about you, as well. Shane’s dad, too-- a-and his brother. He talks a lot.”

  


She laughs, a pleased and delighted sound that fills the cafe until Shane shakes his head with a rueful roll of his eyes. 

  


“Uh, here-...” Ryan steps back, hurriedly. “Is there anywhere you’d like to sit? We don’t have any bookings or anything today.”

  


“Wherever.” Shane tells him, still smiling broadly. 

  


Ryan crowds them into a small and rounded table by the window, away from the entranceway in case other customers arrived, away from the arctic chill outside, but still with a plain view of the street and those passing by. Ryan knows how Shane likes to people-watch-- and maybe that runs in the family. He hurries off to bring them both menus, and takes their orders up to Andrew who offers an encouraging but fleeting wink to him, before shooing him away, and back to that little round table. 

  


He’s surprised by how much she knows, how many anecdotes Shane had found endearing enough to repeat to somebody else. She’s kind and caring and brimming with a genuine interest in Ryan and in Shane’s life in this new and strange city. She makes a conscious effort to include Ryan, asking him questions about his home life, about his mum-- and Ryan wonders if Shane had warned her about the sore point still surrounding his absent father figure, for she steers clear of it entirely, as if she knows that he only has one parent remaining. She loves her son with the kind of boundless and over-eager enthusiasm that only a mother could, and it’s more than plain that she’s proud of him. It makes Ryan want to fish out his phone and send his own mum a text to remind her that he loves her, too-- but he refrains. Such messages almost always result in a phone call because Hana is half-certain something must have happened to Ryan to force him to message her something so uncharacteristically sappy. 

  


“I gotta go to the little boys room.” Shane says after draining the remaining dregs of his coffee. “I’ll be right back.” He slips from his seat, and lopes wordlessly toward the counter to briefly converse with Andrew, before following his directions behind the pastry display. 

  


“Now that he’s gone.” Ryan starts, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile. “What was he like as a kid? Did he believe in ghosts at any point?”

  


She laughs, brightly. “Oh. Ghosts, no. He did have a Bigfoot craze when he was about ten. It was everything-- on his pyjamas, his lunchbox, you know- the whole works. But, he grew out of it quickly. Scott was the one who believed in ghosts.” She says, in reference to her other son-- Shane’s older brother. 

  


It’s a strange thought to Ryan, that Shane is a younger sibling. 

  


“Really?” He asks, frowning faintly.

  


“Oh, yes. He used to see things quite often. Or, he said he did. He very much believed the old house was haunted.” 

  


“Shane never saw anything?”

  


Slowly, she shakes her head - lifting her cappuccino back to her lips as she considers, nose crinkling at its bridge. “He used to. When he was very young. I don’t know how much of that was Scott’s influence. But, I think the accident made it all stop.”

  


Ryan shifts. “Accident?”

  


“Mm.” She pauses, swallowing her mouthful. “He used to get into bed with Greg and I some nights when he was very afraid. He used to watch those pulpy horror films, you know the ones? The Exorcist and such? Then he’d scare himself so much that he wouldn’t sleep. But, when he was six, Greg was driving him home from soccer practice, at midday mind you,” She points out, with a firm look over the thick rims of her glasses. “..-a drunk driver almost totalled the car. They were both all right, thankfully. Greg had a stiff neck, and Shane had some bruises and hairline fracture in his wrist, but he was all right. It didn’t stop him from playing soccer, and at that age, that’s all that mattered. After that, he stopped being so worried about-... you know, funny things happening in his sleep.”

  


“I didn’t know he got into an accident.” Ryan says, voice soft.

  


She waves him off, dismissive. “No, it wasn’t a big deal, really. It scared me to death at the time. They came out just fine in the end. I think it might have awoken something in Shane.”

  


“Common sense?” Shane’s voice interjects. 

  


The chair beside Ryan scrapes as it’s drawn back, and he looks over with a grin as Shane slides back into his seat, reaching forward to wrap his long fingers around the cusp of his hot chocolate mug. His gaze is watchful and amused as it regards Ryan. 

  


“I leave you alone for two minutes and you start talking about ghosts.”

  


“It was worth it, dude. At some point in your life, you believed in ghosts.” Ryan shoots back, reaching over to prod a playful finger into the curve of Shane’s shoulder. “Gotcha.”

  


Something passes through Shane’s sleepy-eyed stare, something poignant and dark. Something that is there and gone again before Ryan can blink. Something shifting and unfamiliar, something soon masked by another broad smile and a light quirk of a slender brow. 

  


“I was a kid.” He rebuffs, coolly. “This isn’t a ‘gotcha’ moment.”

  


.xx.  


  


“Did she like me?” Ryan asks after dinner, when he and Shane both sit, content and fully-fed, on the broad couch in front of their entertainment system while another episode of _Riverdale_ that neither of them is paying attention to plays across the broad and flat screen.

  


“Of course she did. She wasn’t ever going to hate you, Ryan.” Shane counters, fingers wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Rekorderlig balanced precariously upon the cusp of his thigh, eyes half-focussed on the TV.

  


“But did she say that to you? Are these her words or your assumptions?” Ryan presses.

  


A smile plays idly across Shane’s lips. “Her words. She thinks you’re helping me out of my shell. She also thinks you’re responsible and that I should learn from you when it comes to housekeeping.”

  


“Well, she’s fucking right, dude. I’m tired of talking you through doing laundry.”

  


“I’m getting the hang of it. It’s not my fault it’s a needlessly complex task.” Shane mutters, bringing the cider to his lips for a sip. The sickly-sweet scent of fermented apples reaches Ryan, and prickles along his tastebuds. 

  


“Well, I’m glad she liked me. She’s a nice lady.”

  


“Mm.” Shane agrees, nodding as he lowers the bottle again. He turns his head to peer sidelong at Ryan, gaze inquisitive in the half-dark, illuminating them both in the shifting light from the television. “Why does it matter so much to you what she thinks?”

  


“I care what people think.” Ryan says, offering a dismissive shrug. He pauses, tugging at the hemline of his fraying shirt. “Even though people say we shouldn’t give a shit what others think, I still do. I want them to like me.”

  


“Is that it?”

  


“No.” Again, he pauses. He shifts where he sits, not quite comfortable with being put on the spot, with being open and vulnerable, naked in a way he rarely is in front of others. “It’s important to me that she likes me. She’s your mum, y’know? I wanted to make a good impression.”

  


Shane shifts where he sits, he bumps his knee into Ryan’s, and when Ryan looks up - Shane is smiling at him, gently, reproachfully. 

  


“She likes you, man.” He reassures, softly. “She’d be mad not to.”

  


.xx.  


  


Music thrums behind him. The street rushes before him. Cars drift down the labyrinth of twisting roads snaking through the city tracing ribbons through the night with their headlights, hazy and technicolour against the pink-flushed sky, striped like ice cream from the tint of the setting sun. People drift by in couples and groups, sometimes laughing, sometimes texting, sometimes talking animatedly- bringing with them the faint scent of body-spray and sweet perfume that whisks past him in plumes, fleeting - there and gone again as quickly as their owners. 

  


The bar is named Adamo’s, framed by a neon sign that illuminates the street in a flash of red. It’s upmarket, with high tables and high stools, faux plants and blushed flowers set into porcelain vases arranged deliberately at the center of every table-- an arrangement that Shane had been quick to inch aside with a quirk of a long finger and a thinly-veiled smile spared Ryan’s way. Two cocktails sit between them; Ryan’s Gummy Beartini (that Shane had promptly made a face at when he’d dared utter its name aloud), and Shane’s popcorn martini-- generously garnished with a buttercream liqueur. The very scent of which had made Ryan’s mouth water. His glances at it must have been longing enough, for Shane had pushed it his way with an emphatic roll of his eyes, gesturing for him to give it a try. 

  


The gummy beartini is good, but the popcorn marini easily wins out against it, despite the floating offerings of gummy sweetness that had bobbed along the surface of Ryan’s. He’s three drinks in and buzzing. He can feel it peaking at the crests of his cheeks, sending his fingertips pleasantly numb, inching into his stomach with an eager thrill. He doesn’t drink much these days. He’d gotten the majority out of his system back in college, largely thanks to Eugene. 

  


Maybe it’s the cocktails, and maybe it’s the scent of caramel popcorn between them, but Ryan doesn’t blink twice when Shane abruptly looks at him and asks;

  


“Can you tell me about your last girlfriend?”

  


Ryan almost chokes on his mouthful of sickly-sweet liquor. “What?”

  


“Eugene told me you had a steady relationship through college. Why did it end?” 

  


Ryan blinks, slowly -- carefully setting his martini glass down upon the table between them as he frowns, trying to order his muddled thoughts as a dull breeze drifts by them. A girl sitting opposite her date to Ryan’s right is wearing a red satin dress whose skirts flutter delicately against the breeze. He looks towards it, if only to save himself from meeting Shane’s searching gaze. 

  


“I dunno.” He stammers. “Things just got too much, you know?”

  


Shane’s expression is difficult to discern. He’s silent only for a moment. “No. Not really.”

  


“It’s a long story.”

  


“I think I can keep up.” He says, voice gentle -- earnest. 

  


Ryan sighs. 

  


“She was my first girlfriend.” He starts, pushing at the flared base of his martini glass, “We’d been together for-... almost three years. I think everyone around us kinda-... thought that was it, y’know? We’d be together forever, go the whole mile. I met her in my freshman year, and she was all I thought about, basically. But then, y’know.” 

  


He pauses to lift his martini glass back to his lips. He takes a large mouthful, and swallows it in one gulp- hopeful it might give him the courage he needs to continue to the difficult part of the story. 

  


“..-life happened, I guess.”

  


“Life?”

  


“Yeah.” Ryan doesn’t look up, still. “My-... my dad died, and nobody really saw it coming. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t-... made my peace with it yet. I still haven’t.” His throat tightens. He swallows, blinking away the warmth that steals through his gaze, pushing on despite how he can see Shane’s expression soften out of the corner of his eye. “She didn’t really know what to do. I mean-... how d’you comfort somebody through something like that? You don’t. They gotta do the work themselves. You can’t fix somebody else. You can’t reverse loss. But, I just-... shut down, y’know? I didn’t want to deal with people. I just wanted to be with my family. She told me that I had changed. That I’d gotten-... angry, and distant. To me, it felt like she was only making it harder to move on. We had a real nasty fight. Eugene was there for part of it, even.” Ryan admits, feeling a sudden pang of guilt for it. It wasn’t his proudest moment. “We haven’t spoken since. I feel like the pain of losing her got-... muddled up in the pain of losing my dad, until I was just a big-... ball of it. So, I drank. A shitton.”

  


“You hardly drink now.” Shane observes, quietly. 

  


“Yeah. I realised I might have a problem. College and frats really perpetuate that drinking culture. It’s fucked up, dude.” Ryan’s gaze finally meets Shane’s, and he isn’t entirely certain exactly what he had expected to see there, veiled under a tired-eyed, hazel burn- but it’s pained. It’s sympathetic, but far from pitying- as if Shane knows the latter isn’t what Ryan would ever wish for. 

  


“I’m sorry you had to go through that.” He says, voice still soft. “That’s an incredible amount of pain for one person to bare.”

  


Ryan shrugs, leaning back. He rubs a hand over his eyes as if to make sure he isn’t on the verge of tears. “That’s part of life.” 

  


“Sure.” Shane nods. “But most people don’t have to go through it when they’re still so young. When you’re in college, you’re trying to figure out so much. Where you fit in, how you fit in, and what comes next. To add the breakdown of a long-term relationship and the loss of a parental figure? The fact that you survived is a testament to how strong you are.”

  


Again, he huffs - shaking his head as if to dismiss Shane’s gentle encouragement.

  


“No, man.” He continues, “I mean that. I don’t think it’s something I could have handled.”

  


“You seem to be handling the haunting of our apartment pretty well, I dunno.” Ryan says, reaching over to pluck one of the kernels of popcorn melted into the rim of Shane’s martini glass. He pops it past his lips with a quirk of his brow, doing his very best to ignore the flush of warmth that settles in his chest when Shane simply smiles at him, a new and strange kind of awe in his gaze. 

  


“That’s because it’s not haunted.”

  


“Whatever.” Ryan waves a dismissive hand as he chews. “What about you? What’s the story with your love life?” 

  


It feels like a strange subject to broach with him-- his best friend, his roommate, his confidant; the same person Ryan has jerked off to in the quiet seclusion of his bedroom. The same person Ryan has been crushing after since they’d first locked eyes. It’s uncharted territory, venturing into the barren lands of their love lives, because it hasn’t escaped his notice that Shane has never brought a girl (or a guy) home with him before. He’s come home late from work drinks or nights out with friends plenty often, but always alone. 

  


His response is a small shrug. He leans forwards, dragging the sleeve of his denim jacket through a small ring of condensation stained against the table between them. 

  


“It was a year ago. She was a writer. She was really creative, and kind, and clever.”

  


“What happened?” Ryan reaches over to steal another piece of popcorn off Shane’s martini. 

  


“We kind of realised-... we were more like friends.” He says, thoughtfully. “I loved her, but I loved her the same way I love my friends from college. She felt the same way for me. It was amicable enough, but still painful for me. It meant losing something with her that I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to.”

  


“You don’t still see her?” He asks. 

  


“No.” Shane shakes his head, smile wistful, and far-off; as if indulging in some private joke Ryan isn’t privy to. 

  


“She finds me draining, these days.”

  


.xx.  


  


It’s late on a Saturday evening, and Ryan is alone. 

  


The streets are dark, illuminated by streetlights that riddle the edges of the roadside with a tinny, silver glow. The sky is a dulled blue, the velveteen cover of night blanketed in a thick shroud of grey, veiling the twisting streets with the faint and woodsy scent of impending rain, layered beneath the silvery clouds. Puddles fill in the dips and divots in the pavement and the road, still wet with a sheen that illuminates with the haloed street light, a quiet reminder, if nothing else, for Ryan to hurry home before the sky opens up and rains a second time. Less forgiving than the first. 

  


Thunder rumbles in the distance, as if chasing at the bite of his heels as he walks, eyes on the scuffed toes of his sneakers as he focuses on putting one foot in front of the other. His world is blurred at the edges, burned with a hazy gossamer tint flavoured elegantly by old whiskey and Eugene’s honey-and-vodka shots that hadn’t sat well with him. His tongue still feels sickly-sweet. His throat still burns. His shoulders still hurt from pressing through crowds. His ears still throb from the music that had filled the rooms of the old house to the rafters; and he realises, here-- half-way home at two in the morning, that house parties aren’t as fun as he remembers. 

  


The last one he’d gone to had been when he had met Shane. He’d gone because Eugene was going. It often feels like Ryan has to go to a house party to see Eugene. Most often, he’s there-- amidst a crowd of people, drunk, and utterly exuberant; as if those moments are the ones that bring him the most to life. 

  


A twenty year old Ryan Bergara might have been able to keep pace with him. But a twenty-seven year old Ryan Bergara can’t any longer. 

  


Can’t, and doesn’t want to. 

  


He looks up, breath tumbling past his lips in a plume of vapour that surprises him. He’s wearing a jacket with a collar that coils neatly about the nape of his neck, with the sleeves pulled down over his hands, but the cold feels far-off-- another sure sign that he might have had a few too many shots. 

  


There is a dull scuff behind him. 

  


Ryan turns his head, glancing over his shoulder with an arched brow. 

  


Two houses down, there’s a figure-- a silhouette half-shrouded in darkness. Someone else stumbling home, one drunkard of many that had lined the main bar strip in droves. He doesn’t think twice as he looks away, and refocuses his attention upon his feet, trying not to trip over any uneven strips of pavement. 

  


He’s only a block away from home, now. He can see their building, jutting proudly into the sky before him, reaching for the clouds with only a dozen illuminated windows casting golden light through the misty haze of night. The sight of it brings a smile to his lips. He can’t wait to crawl into bed, to strip out of these clothes, to curl up where it’s warm and safe-...

  


A hand claps down upon his left shoulder. It’s harsh and demanding, sudden and strong. It pushes him back, turning him sharply into the cold and metallic garage door of his neighbouring building. The surface presses sharply into his cheek. The breath in his lungs is forced out in one harsh exhale. His stomach drops. His heart leaps into his throat. Panic seizes his stomach belatedly. His movements feel sluggish and laboured. He feels dread sink through him and he closes his eyes as stars spark against the backs of his eyelids.

  


“Don’t move.” 

  


The voice is unfamiliar and gruff. Something cold and hairline-thin presses into the curve of Ryan’s cheek. 

  


He opens his eyes. 

  


It takes him a moment to re-focus on the street, on the silver light shining in from under the garage door. He brings his gaze up, and he sees a figure behind him-- the same figure that had been following him, a few houses behind, just a moment ago. There’s a knife levelled at his cheek, with the sharp edge pressed to his skin. 

  


His blood runs cold. That panic begins to shudder through him, demanding and harsh. 

  


A clumsy hand is rifling through his pockets, peeling his jacket back to hastily pull back the zippers holding the pockets closed to check what could be inside them. When they find nothing, they withdraw- and move for his jean pockets, next.

  


“I don’t have any cash.” Ryan breathes out, voice wavering and distant. 

  


The knife held to his cheek presses down. Pain sparks through him, shuddering outwards from the cold kiss of steel. 

  


“Shut the fuck up.” Says that same gruff tone. “Hold still, or I’ll carve your tongue out.”

  


There’s another figure, milling at the end of the street-- watching them, lingering under the glow of the streetlamp, half-illuminated by the brilliance of a phone screen, held aloft before them.

  


“Hey-- Hey!” Ryan calls, “Help me--! _Help_\--!!”

  


“What did I _fucking_ say?” That knife digs in. Pain sears through Ryan, sharp and insistent. A hand grips tightly against the collar of his jacket, curling against the nape of his neck until he can feel the urgent press of his assailant’s knuckles. “You ain’t getting help here, kid. Shut up and hold still.” 

  


Something warm creeps down the cusp of Ryan’s cheek. It seeps into the collar of his shirt. His eyes feel wet. His heart is racing, beating rabbit-like against the cage of his ribs, earnest and desperate and terribly, terribly afraid. People are killed by accident in muggings all the time, and he doesn’t want to be another statistic. 

  


A hand gropes heedlessly through his pockets until it finds his wallet; compact, folded and leather, stowed deeply in the back pocket of his jeans. It’s fished free, and Ryan grimaces internally at all the cards he’s going to have to cancel, and then replace-- if he gets out of this alive.

  


He hears the sound of rifling, and he knows what this stranger is looking for. 

  


“Fucking hell.”

  


“I said I don’t have cash.” He murmurs, trying to keep the ‘told-you-so’ out of his tone. 

  


He must fail.

  


The man presses close to him. He hears a dull thud as his wallet is cast aside, onto the pavement. The knife sinks back into his skin. The scent of old cigarettes and stale whiskey permeates the air, dripping from the stranger’s breath as he rasps his words against the lobe of Ryan’s ear. 

  


“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t cut your fucking _throat_ open--”

  


“Hey!” 

  


Another voice cuts through the night’s silence. 

  


Ryan flinches, eyes pressing sharply closed; almost positive this must be the man from the end of the street here to have his thrill, here to help this man finish the job. Otherwise, they’d be letting Ryan off easy. They’d be letting loose a witness who they hadn’t extorted money from. What was the use in that?

  


“Move it along.” He says. “Nothin’ to see here.”

  


“I don’t think that’s the case, here.” The voice is familiar. Friendly in cadence, but undeniably laced with a sharp edge.

  


“What the fuck d’you mean?” The grip holding him pinned in place shifts. 

  


“I mean that I think you should leave.” 

  


It’s Shane. Relief floods through Ryan at once, like the first wave at high tide. It washes through him, sharp and cresting and wonderful. He breathes out a shuddering sigh. His heart leaps forwards. His body shudders against the steel door beneath him. 

  


A lengthy pause follows Shane’s words. 

  


Ryan hears the scrape of a shoe against asphalt. He hears his assailant draw in a sharp and shallow breath, one that is partly disbelieving, one that is faint and fearful.

  


“The fuck--!” 

  


He releases Ryan.

  


The knife clatters to the pavement. 

  


He hears the distant sound of retreating footsteps, and a broken shout from somewhere down the street, but at that moment-- fight or flight for Ryan takes over. The adrenaline that had been simmering below his skin breaks free. He scrambles back, he snatches up his wallet, he kicks the knife away with the toe of his shoe, and he reaches out to grip hold of Shane’s elbow, and tug him sharply away from the garage door. 

  


Together, they stumble down the street. The night air is biting and cold. It’s sobering and sharp, whipping against the crests of his cheeks, across the wet streak of blood seeping from the wound carved through his flesh. His footfalls feel far-off and dulled under the roar of his own heartbeat, with his wallet in one hand, and Shane’s hand in the other. He runs-- without care for who might be following them, or who might be watching them. He doesn’t stop, he doesn’t slow-- not until they make it to the entrance to the lobby of their building, illuminated in resplendent gold, radiant with the promise of safety and security in their sanctuary amidst the clouds. 

  


He’s ragged and breathless by the time he stumbles to a halt. Shane is red-faced and gasping- fishing his keys from the left pocket of his sweat pants as he spares Ryan a reproachful smile, unlocking the lobby door smoothly to permit them entry. 

  


“What the fuck?” It’s the first thing that leaves Ryan as they’re engulfed in warmth. 

  


“What were you thinking, Ryan?”

  


“What?”

  


“They could have killed you! Do you know how many people are killed in muggings and hit-and-runs? The statistics are fucking insane.” Shane admonishes, frustration quickly creasing his features. “He wanted to kill you.”

  


“How d’you know that?”

  


“I could see it. He had a knife, Ryan.”

  


“He just wanted money.”

  


“Which you didn’t have!”

  


“Alright, how d’you know _that_?”

  


“You never carry cash! I’m always having to pay for your half when restaurants don’t do split bills! It’s a pain in the ass!” 

  


“Alright, fair.”

  


Shane impatiently jams the ‘up’ button as they reach the elevator. “Don’t walk home at this time. Take the fucking subway, or a bus-- the stop is right down the road. It’s so much safer than taking the fucking back way to get home.”

  


“There was no point. It’s like a ten minute walk--”

  


“Ten minutes is enough for somebody to slit your _throat_, man.”

  


The elevator dings. The silver doors slide open to the brightly lit elevator, granting Ryan a glimpse at his reflection in the mirror against the wall inside. He blinks, blearily-- struggling to clear his thoughts as he starts, hesitantly forwards. He sees Shane crowd in behind him, looming like a shadow over his shoulder as he stares at his reflection, reaching out to press the button for their floor as the doors glide shut behind them, closing against the rest of reality that, at times, felt so far away when they were here. 

  


There’s a jagged gash carved through the crest of his right cheek. It’s deep. Deep enough that Ryan can see tissue and sinew beneath the gleam of his own blood, dripping in stark rivulets toward the hinge of his jaw. It’s already woven delicate threads down the column of his throat, snaking outwards and coiling back in like a spider’s web that has blossomed against the collar of his shirt, stark and vibrant like a rose petal. 

  


“Fuck.” He breathes out.

  


“You need stitches.” Shane tells him, voice firm. “Are you in pain?”

  


“I’m fine. I don’t need stitches.”

  


“You do. You also need to call the cops to do a police report.”

  


“I’m not doing that.”

  


“_Ryan_.”

  


“How did you scare them away?”

  


“I called the cops.” 

  


“Did you?” Ryan’s gaze jumps upwards, looking up at Shane in the mirror. He’s still watching Ryan, gaze half-lidded, pupils blown wide until his irises are nought but thin brown rings against the outside. His attention is fixed upon that stark line of red along Ryan’s cheek, bright with arterial blood, snaking across his neck like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. 

  


“I got my phone out.” Shane says, without missing a beat, without blinking, without looking up. He looks as drunk as Ryan feels, but he’s been home all night. In their apartment -- where neither of them keep alcohol unless it’s for cooking. “I had the numbers punched in. I held it up for him to see. He saw it, and he ran. His friend left, too.” 

  


“That’s smart.” Ryan murmurs. 

  


“I’m smart, in case you hadn’t noticed.” 

  


“No.” The elevator dings. “I’d noticed that.”

  


The doors glide open. Shane’s fingers curl around the cusp of Ryan’s arm, thumb digging in against the bend of his elbow. He pulls sharply to draw him away from the silvery mirror, and out into the brightly-lit hall, littered with the doors of their neighbours Ryan had yet to see ever open or close. 

  


Their footfalls are silent against the plush carpeting that blankets the corridor, snaking down towards the door to their apartment. Shane has his keys out to unlock the door in a mere beat, and the moment they are inside-- he’s guiding Ryan toward the couch with a grip that’s stronger and steadier than Ryan would have thought him capable. His knees buckle against the edge of the couch and he falls back against it-- realising just how drunk he is as his whole world lurches and spins, swirling in a kaleidoscope of colours he can’t discern. It brings a mindless smile across his lips, it earns a spluttered laugh, and he leans his head back against the backrest of the couch, content to sleep here.

  


“Turn your head.” Shane’s voice interrupts his thoughts, and Ryan blinks his eyes wearily open. He’s there, perched upon the edge of their coffee table with a first aid kit open in his lap. He’s wearing a single white latex glove, and leaning in with a careful hand extended towards him.

  


“Dude--”

  


“If you won’t go to the hospital, at least let me fucking fix you up.” Shane admonishes, sharply. 

  


“Fuck.” Ryan tips his head back, turning his gaze toward the balcony doors so that the wound is angled toward Shane. “Fine. If I fall asleep though, that’s on you.”

  


“Trust me,” Shane mutters. “That won’t be a problem.” 

  


The scent of alcohol stains the air, and Ryan wrinkles the bridge of his nose in distaste all but immediately. The first dab of cotton earns a grimace, and then a sharp hiss as pain sizzles outwards from the wound, sharp, spiking and earnest. It stings. He cringes away.

  


“Hold still.” Shane says. “The pain will stop after a second, just wait.”

  


He’s right. It sears and tingles, but ebbs away-- slowly but surely. 

  


“I wish you’d just called me.”

  


“Wh--?”

  


“Before you left the party, I wish you’d just called. I would’ve come to meet you there, and then walk you back.” His words are quiet and thoughtful, fingers moving to dab delicately at the wound.

  


“I didn’t wanna bother you.” Ryan says, “Said you were reading about Cicero or some shit, I didn’t wanna interrupt that. Plus, what if you decided to go see other friends? I know I’m not all you have.”

  


Shane’s smile is half-hearted. It doesn’t reach his eyes. He casts the cotton ball aside, and shifts through the first aid kit for a slim sheet of butterfly stitches. Ryan squeezes his eyes shut at the sight of them, for it feels like an incredible over-reaction. He doesn’t utter this aloud, and holds still as Shane methodically presses the edges of his wound closed to stick the stitches over the top.

  


“We’re gonna have to change them in the morning.” He says, softly. “But, that’s fine for now. You might wanna-... drink some water, and wash your face. Maybe put the shirt in the wash, though I dunno if you wanna save it.”

  


“Can’t believe I almost got mugged.” Ryan mutters.

  


“Yeah, me neither. Who would’ve thought one of your most irritating traits would turn out to be useful? What will petty criminals do in this modern age of cashless transactions?” The last stitch is pressed into place, and Shane leans back - satisfied with his work. “Will you let me know how you feel in the morning?”

  


“Mm.” Ryan nods, sleepily. “I guarantee you that my hangover is gonna be worse than this paper-cut.”

  


“It’s not a paper cut, but-..” Shane shakes his head, easing the kit from his lap and moving to stand. “..-whatever you say, bud.”

  


His sweatpants shift, smoothing against the tops of his thighs. A frown creases Ryan’s brows. 

  


“Hey, wait-..” He lifts a hand. “Can you turn around?”

  


Confused, Shane hesitates, but does as Ryan asks. 

  


There’s no pockets at the back of the sweats. There’s no pockets on his shirt, either.

  


“What?”

  


Ryan stares at them, at Shane’s legs, at how smoothly the pockets fall over the curves of his thighs- and he’s stared at them both in and out of sweats to know how they ought to look, especially when there is a phone or a wallet stuffed into his pockets.

  


“Nothing.” He says, after a lengthy pause. “Thought-... um-... thought you’d stolen my sweats.” He mutters, lifting a hand to rub his tired fingertips across the backs of his eyelids. 

  


“Don’t be stupid.” Shane mutters. “Your pants would fit me like shorts.”

  


He carries the kit back into the kitchen. Ryan’s head throbs. 

  


It’s entirely possible he’d taken it out when they’d made it back into the apartment. It’s entirely possible that Ryan is too drunk to be making sweeping realisations, but looking at those sweatpants he’s sure of it. Jersey cotton hides little. 

  


Shane doesn’t have his phone.

  


.xx.  


  


“I don’t know, man.” Andrew says over the churn of the milk steamer early on Monday morning. “It just seems like a weird thing to lie about.”

  


Ryan stands beside him, dusting chocolate powder onto a pair of skim cappuccinos, lost in thought some thousand miles away, high above the city. He’s burned his fingers twice, and nearly dropped three different take-away orders. Andrew had been quick to shoo him away from the coffee machine, and delegate him to taking and giving orders instead; where he’s able to do less damage. 

  


“That’s what I’m hung up on.” Ryan tells him, earnestly - quietly; forcing a smile as he slips the polythyrene lids back on top of the take-away cups to hand them off to their customers. “I just don’t get it. I don’t get how he got them to run. I don’t get how he found me there in the first place.”

  


“Well, you were drunk.” Andrew points out. “..and coming back from Eugene’s place. He’s a friend of Shane’s, too. Maybe he took the phone out of his pocket when you got back to the apartment.”

  


“He didn’t. I was watching him.”

  


“What d’you want me to say? That he scared them off by being intimidating? I don’t wanna sound like an ass here, but Shane is one of the least intimidating people I’ve ever met.” Andrew hands him another take-away cup with flourished latte art embossed into its foam. Ryan is loath to place the lid on top of it, it looks so charming. 

  


He thinks back to their trip in the elevator, to how closely Shane had stood to him, to how his hooded eyes had traced the rivulet of blood from the crest of his cheek, down to the idle slope of his throat. He thinks back to how he’d been standing, how he’d been speaking-- how he’d looked at Ryan as if he had been something to devour.

  


“Uh.. sorry, I’m in a rush.”

  


“Ryan.” Andrew nudges him. 

  


Ryan snaps from his thoughts, and looks up to see a blue-eyed woman smiling politely at him, her hand held aloft to accept her coffee.

  


“Sorry. Shit.” He slaps the lid in place and holds out the cup to her. “Sorry.”

  


“Dude.” Andrew mutters to him once the woman has turned upon her heel and drifted out of earshot. “D’you wanna go back to closing or what?”

  


“No, no.” Ryan shakes his head. “I’m here.”

  


.xx.  


  


He’s sitting on their couch that evening, flipping idly through movie options on Netflix, staring unseeingly at their boldly-labelled titles and colourful intro cards, but none of them seem alluring or interesting enough to capture his attention. He’s sitting on the couch, legs crossed before him, dressed in a simple pair of sweats and a shirt he knows belongs to Shane. His cologne hangs in the air, doused by the scent of driftwood and mint; something ephemeral and uniquely Shane. Despite his absence, he is everywhere in the apartment; cluttered on the shelves in one too many history books, behind picture frames with his arms around friends and family and sometimes Ryan, stored in vintage vinyl sleeves by old artists Ryan’s never heard of, tucked into ornate boxes of polyhedral dice for games of Dungeons & Dragons he won’t get the chance to play because ‘life just gets in the way’. His scent lingers in the air, his presence settles idly by the front door; waiting for its time to swing open to herald his return after a long day at work, full of playful anecdotes about his coworkers and his boss, chiding but still fond in a way that Ryan can’t place, using words that sound like they’re from another century; things like _centurion_, _befuddled_ and _grubbling_. 

  


Ryan breathes out a quiet sigh, tossing the remote from his grip, and onto the vacant couch cushion beside him. He draws to his feet, and runs two fingers along the now-closed cut sliced along the crest of his cheekbone. It still hurts, but it’s well on the mend - thanks to Shane’s insistence on butterfly stitches, a pauper’s excuse for the real thing. 

  


He drifts out and onto the balcony where the cool night air runs its idle fingers through his dark hair, tugging at half-formed curls, tracing the angular lines of his shoulders, and his arms; settling loosely around him as if he isn’t quite real. He rests his hands against the railing, and he looks down at the city below him; alight with a technocolour burn. He wonders where Shane is, which indistinguishable speck of light drifting along the labyrinth of roads contains him. He wonders what he’ll say to him when he comes home, wonders what he’ll make for dinner, whether they will share a bed tonight. 

  


He wonders if all of this is normal; if this is what happens to most people after they graduate college and find a new roommate-- if they become unwittingly embroiled in the complexities of city life, combined with the added complication of a roommate who feels like some kind of cosmically-crafted soulmate. Plenty has changed, and the added complication of a semi-viral YouTube video had done little to placate Ryan’s worries over a possible haunting. The video had gotten upwards of fifty-thousand views, with a long string of comments too lengthy and accusatory for Ryan to sift through. Some had been full of accusations of fraud for virality’s sake. Others had visibly been written by people very young. Responding to children wasn’t high on his list of things to do, so Ryan had let the video lie- while he mulled over the moral implications of daring to monetize something so contentious. 

  


Warm fingers curl against the nape of his neck, solid and corporeal, pulling him slowly from his thoughts. The scent of aged pine and mint filters towards him, carried by the unhurried wind, and Ryan closes his eyes. He turns his head, and those fingertips wander upwards, into his hair; in a touch that is decidedly intimate, reminding him of how precariously they are straddling this line between friends and something more so delicately. He leans into him, thoughtlessly, heedlessly, and Shane holds him; content to settle in this silence alongside him, illuminated by the buzzing city lights and the pink-stained sky above them, while their TV echoes the title cards of _Lucifer_ into the open living room. 

  


“You feel far away.” Shane’s voice is a murmur, a distant rumble of thunder echoing from deep within his chest. “You doing alright?”

  


Ryan is quiet for a long moment, skin prickling under Shane’s wandering fingertips as they rest against the nape of his neck once more, warm and present and comfortable. He doesn’t want that hand to ever stray away from him, and he isn’t certain when this insatiable longing overtook him. 

  


“Yeah. I think so.” He offers by way of a response. 

  


“You went through something traumatic.” Shane reminds him, quietly. “It’s okay to need time to process it. It’s human.” 

  


“Mmh.” His eyes ease closed again. 

  


He feels Shane shift, feels his lips press into Ryan’s wayward curls. It’s a momentary touch, but it sends a bolt of warmth to Ryan’s chest.

  


“What do you want for dinner?” He asks into his hair. 

  


“Whatever you’re having.”

  


Shane chuckles, it’s breathy and deep; and his touch withdraws. His hands extend to grip the tops of Ryan’s shoulders in a momentary squeeze, only to let him go after a moment. He turns away, his scent and his warmth recede, back into the apartment that smells so strongly of him while Ryan stares, unseeingly, down at the city below him, at how it winds and turns and burns indistinctly on below him. 

  


It is as if the pieces of some indistinguishable puzzle are being pushed together, as if the edges are overlapping, and meeting just a little too perfectly. It is as if the city below him has held on to this secret for too long, and is offering it to him on the tail-end of a too-warm breeze in the heart of winter.

  


Some things are too terrible to grasp all at once. 

  


.xx.  


  


He takes Tuesday off from work. He sleeps alone in his bed, with the door locked - he doesn’t answer when Shane knocks on his door to say goodbye. He doesn’t respond to the text that follows - from Shane, wishing him a good day.

  


The moment the door closes after him, Ryan is out of bed. He’s changing into a simple white crewneck and a pair of blue jeans with a sweater he’s mostly certain belongs to Shane (the sleeves are far too long). He pulls on the nearest pair of sneakers to him, and runs his fingers through his hair in lieu of brushing it. He makes a hasty black coffee in the kitchen, and knocks it back in one gulp before brushing his teeth, and leaving the apartment. 

  


He catches an Uber to Eugene’s, and with his half-charged phone gripped tightly in one hand, he knocks sharply upon the door the moment he arrives, barely pausing to think twice about how early it is, or the fact that he hadn’t even been invited over. 

  


He knocks again when there is no answer. Then again, a few moments later. 

  


The door opens at last, to a very tired-eyed Keith who blinks wearily down at Ryan as if he’s the very last person he expected to see on his doorstep at eight in the morning. 

  


“Dude--” He starts. 

  


“Sorry.” Ryan steps forwards, reaching out to place an open palm on Keith’s bare chest as he nudges him, smoothly, out of the way. “I gotta talk to Eugene.”

  


“He’s asleep.” Keith tries, closing the door after him. “What’s this about? Are you moving back in?”

  


“What?” Another voice interrupts, and Ned appears in the doorway to his bedroom as Ryan shoulders past, not bothering to respond to Keith.

  


“Ryan’s moving back in!” Keith announces. 

  


“Oh, shit, really? Ryan! That’s amazing! Guess it didn’t work out with Shane, huh?”

  


“Beautiful Shane.” Keith muses, voice growing faint as Ryan swiftly rounds the corner, flitting past Zack’s closed door until he makes it to Eugene’s. He lifts a closed fist, and knocks, sharply, upon it. 

  


Predictably, there’s no answer. 

  


The house is one that Ryan had lived in prior to graduation, prior to moving in with Shane. He’s familiar with it, he’d lost his virginity in it, he’d gotten so drunk that he’d passed out on almost any available surface, even if that meant ending up in somebody else’s bed when the door had previously been locked. 

  


He grips the handle in his left hand, and gives it a sharp twist - ramming his shoulder into the door, harshly, until it gives, flying open under his weight. He stumbles, unceremoniously inside, to find Eugene -- fast asleep upon a relative mountain of pillows and twisted blankets, wearing only a hockey jersey that Ryan realises belatedly doesn’t belong to him. 

  


“Christ..” He mutters, crossing swiftly to the bed, and reaching out to shove, sharply, at Eugene’s chest.

  


“Ugh-..”

  


“Wake up, dude.” Ryan quips. “I gotta talk to you.”

  


“...-the fuck?” Eugene lifts his head, eyes pressed tightly shut, voice hoarse and rough.

  


It takes a full half-hour for Eugene to gather himself together. He showers, he drinks two full cups of coffee, he banters insufferably with Keith and Ned, and he returns to his room in a lavish robe, cradling the remnants of his second energy drink. He sits beside Ryan upon his unmade bed, and diligently folds one leg upon the other, before peering searchingly at him, eyes narrowed considerably. 

  


“So, Keith tells me that you’re moving back in.”

  


Ryan lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and his thumb. “I literally never said that. I showed up here and from that, somehow, he figured I was moving back in.”

  


“Things aren’t working out with Shane, huh?”

  


“What? No. That’s not it.”

  


“Then what brings you here, to my doorstep?”

  


Ryan runs his fingers through his hair, frustrated, and realising only now that he hadn’t exactly thought this through. 

  


“When you-... introduced us, you said that he was the ‘perfect person’ for me. What did you mean by that?”

  


Eugene’s smile turns knowing. He pauses to take a sip from his drink, a sip that’s much too long, and leaves Ryan watching him, anxiously. 

  


“Well.” He starts. “You’re like a little tornado sometimes, you know? You’re a stormy little ocean, and Shane is steady. He’s cool, calm, collected. He’s soothing, and you’re high-energy and controlling. You need to have your little fingers in everything. He isn’t like that. I thought you would compliment each other well in terms of living together. Have you tasted his cooking by the way?”

  


“I have. It’s amazing.” Ryan is flippant. 

  


“Right? So, I thought at worst, you’d make great roommates. At best…?” He trails off, and offers Ryan a knowing quirk of his brow. 

  


“What?” 

  


“I figured you’d have a healthy, very sexual, polyamorous relationship.”

  


“Eugene--”

  


“No. Could you imagine? Shane is way too Shane for that. No, no. You’d go steady. Get married in the Hamptons and adopt twelve dogs. It’d be good, you know? He’d show you the ropes, you’d be able to stop being a control-freak, and it would be good for everybody. They’d finally get a Ryan who loosens up.”

  


“So you tried to set us up?” Ryan asks, deadpan. 

  


Eugene nods as he takes another gulp of his energy drink. “Did it work?”

  


“I-...” Ryan hesitates, a denial perched upon the tip of his tongue, a denial that would be filled with half-truths. 

  


“Did it?” Eugene presses, leaning forwards.

  


“I don’t-...”

  


“Ryan?”

  


“Listen-- I don’t know what’s going on.” 

  


“Paint me a word picture.”

  


Ryan lets out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know, okay? I think the apartment we got is haunted-..”

  


“Shocker. You thought this place was haunted.”

  


“That’s because it is. But, this new place is real haunted, dude. I’m talking like-... shit happening almost every night for the first week that we were there. It seems to be happening less and less, lately. Especially lately. But, it freaked me out. Like, a lot. Shane doesn’t think it’s real at all, and he thinks I’m overreacting, but-... we, uh-...”

  


“Mm?” Eugene prompts.

  


“...-we started sharing beds, I dunno when exactly, I just started getting freaked out by being in my room alone.”

  


“That’s pretty gay.” Eugene observes.

  


“I know. I had this moment last night where I realised that if I’m not with him, I’m thinking about him. I got so nervous about meeting his mum, and the last time I got that nervous about meeting someone’s parents was back in Freshman year, when I met Heather’s. You remember how that went.”

  


“Mm. I do. I also remember you offering my dad shots when I tried to introduce you to him.”

  


“That’s-... irrelevant.”

  


“Not really.” Eugene leans forwards to deposit his mug onto his bedside table. “You forgot that my dad was even coming to visit. You got so drunk before he showed up that you mistook him for another student in the biggest case of beer-goggles I’ve ever witnessed. He thought you were charming, still- but that is the antithesis to how you acted to Shane’s parents, I’m betting on that.”

  


“I only met his mum, but-...” He pauses, rubbing idly at the nape of his neck, “...-I mean, yeah. I wanted her to like me so bad, dude.”

  


“See?”

  


“Also, uh-... did you know he got into some car accident when he was a kid?”

  


“Oh.” Eugene leans back, slightly. “Yeah. He doesn’t really-... like to get into it too much. Any time I tried to ask him about it, he’d clam up entirely. So, I’d avoid that if you wanna get to bone-town with him.”

  


“I dunno if that’s what I want.”

  


“Well, okay. You think about him all the time, you wanted to win over his parents, you share a bed with him, he cooks you dinners-... what does that sound like to you? A friend? A roommate? A boyfriend?” 

  


Ryan knows the answer, but he doesn’t want to give Eugene the satisfaction.

  


.xx.  


  


He isn’t sure what’s more troubling; the realisation that he’s falling for Shane, or the knowledge that something isn’t adding up. 

  


He has the pieces to complete the puzzle, but it’s as though some are coloured wrong, traced badly, ill-fitting -- never quite able to slot into the spaces they should fit, and as he walks back to their apartment in the afternoon, he isn’t sure he has the answers he needs to placate himself. His talk with Eugene did little to settle his mind, and still - it races a million miles a moment, wondering- what will this change? What should he do? How will Shane react? Is there even a chance of something more?

  


Arriving back to the empty apartment does little else to mollify him. He wishes Shane was here, now- so he might talk to him about it, try to make sense of it all with him. Tell him about it, like he tells him everything; but this is a secret he can’t share. This is something he can’t discuss with him, and somehow- that thought alone is blinding. 

  


The landline rings at five in the afternoon, and Ryan is startled from his deep-dive on YouTube with a frown. He’d been distinctly aware of Shane installing a landline when they’d first moved in, he remembers chiding him for it, reminding him that only “fossils” use them, but Shane had insisted it was the best way for his mum to stay in touch. 

  


With that thought in mind, and Eugene’s chiding about how desperately Ryan had wanted Miss Madej to like him, Ryan hurries over to answer it, cradling it against his shoulder as the ringing ceases.

  


“Hello?”

  


“Oh, Ryan? Hello! It’s Mandy. I don’t suppose Shane is about?”

  


“No.” Ryan glances over his shoulder, toward their front door, as if in anticipation for Shane to arrive right as he speaks. “He’s still at work, I think. He won’t be back for another half hour or so, I think. He usually gets back at five-thirty. It’s rare he gets back at five.”

  


“Oh, that’s all right then.”

  


“Can I take a message for him, or would you like for me to just tell him to call you back when he gets in?”

  


“Just get him to call me back if you can, dear. Thank you.”

  


“No problem, oh-.. And um, can I ask you something?”

  


“Of course, dear.”

  


Ryan hesitates, fingers curling around the phone until its worn plastic creaks against the press of his fingers. His stomach churns. His heart leaps in his chest. He knows he shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t. He knows-- but he does it anyway.

  


“With-.. Um… that accident. The one Shane and his dad got in, you said he was different afterwards. Can you, uh-... elaborate a little on what you meant by that?”

  


“Oh.” She sounds surprised. Ryan flinches. He knew this was a mistake. “Well, I mean, it was traumatic. You know what trauma does to children. Especially when they are as young as he was at the time. He was very quiet. It felt a lot like he had to re-learn his place in everything, as though he was looking at the world through a fresh set of eyes. It was a wake-up call for him, I suppose. Realising that the world isn’t all sunshine and flowers. That’s something all children have to go through, usually not in such tragic and sudden incidents, of course. Why do you ask?”

  


Something cold settles within Ryan’s chest. Something Father Thomas had said during his visit drifts back to him. 

  


_ ‘Demons feed off energies.’ _

_   
_

_ ‘I can feel it. It isn’t here. But, I can feel it.’ _

_   
_

He thinks back to how Father Thomas had reacted upon seeing Shane in the doorway, how Shane had responded to the visit, how angry he had been, how he had spat his words by Ryan’s ear, a hushed hiss of ‘you love being terrified’ that had frightened Ryan just as much as it had thrilled him. He thinks back to the visit they’d made to his childhood home, to how sickly Shane had grown at sleeping in a room filled with crucifixes and icons, he thinks back to the mugging in the alley, how his attackers had run at the mere sight of Shane, as though he was terrifying enough for them to surrender.

  


He thinks back to all the times he’d awoken in the morning after a sleepless and fear-filled night, only to see a bright-eyed and energized Shane already awake, and making coffee. He thinks of all the times he’d said something that had made Ryan pause and question, all the times he’d uttered words taken from another century, at how ‘Humanity will never learn from its mistakes if they aren’t studied’.

  


He thinks back to what Shane had said about his previous partner, at how ruefully he had smiled around his words. 

  


_ ‘She finds me draining, these days.’ _

_   
_

“Ryan, dear?”

  


The kitchen lights flicker. Ryan’s stomach turns. He feels like he is going to be sick. Revulsion pulses through him. Terror boils in his chest.

  


“Sorry. Um-... no reason. I was just-..”

  


“You’re breaking up, honey. I can’t hear you quite right.”

  


The lights flicker again, dimming the apartment, bathing it in a temporal and momentary blanket of darkness. Ryan’s heart lurches into his throat. He turns to look toward the TV, showing him nothing but static, and the light-sensitive night light sitting on the counter, flickering on and off. The lights flutter back to life, and the line goes dead, ringing a flatline beep into Ryan’s ear. 

  


He lowers the phone, and he turns - looking back toward the front door. 

  


It’s open, held aloft by an outstretched hand. Shane’s silhouette stands in the doorway, framed in gold by the light of the hallway behind him. His bag is still slung upon his shoulder, he’s still immaculately dressed in his button-down, cable-knit sweater, and his slacks. The tinny lights wink and cosucate around him, flickering and burning in resplendent neon, illuminating Ryan’s burgeoning dread. 

  


“Ryan.” His voice is soft, reproachful. It’s gentle, it’s deceiving. 

  


So, he moves quickly. He drops the phone. It clatters loudly against the tiles. Its backing falls away, its battery flies free. Ryan steps nimbly over it, reaching for the topmost drawer of their kitchen island. He wrenches it open, hysteria rising blindly through his chest, choking him, suffocating him as his fingers curl around the hilt of a serrated bread knife as if it might offer him salvation. 

  


He moves around the island, brandishing the knife through the ample space between them as his wild-eyed stare falls upon Shane’s silhouette, still lingering in the doorway with a hand upon the knob and his bag upon his shoulder, every bit the middle-class nobody he’d wanted Ryan to believe him to be, and it makes sense to him now- it makes sense.

  


“Let me explain.”

  


“No.” Ryan’s voice trembles, it’s wild and unhinged and bridled by terror. “No, dude. Fucking-... _no!”_

  


He steps forwards, and he pushes the door closed behind him, slipping the strap of his bookbag from his shoulder, he lets it drop to the floor. Both of his hands lift, fingers splayed apart, as if to show Ryan that he means no harm. 

  


“Stay back.” Ryan warns, heart beating rabbit-like against the cage of his ribs, spurred by fear. Fear he knows Shane must smell upon him. “Stay back, dude. I _fucking_ mean it.”

  


“Will you let me explain?” Shane asks, his voice little more than a whisper. He grows very still, hands raised in surrender. 

  


“I don’t need you to explain. It’s all mapped out so fucking clear to me now, dude. You planned this all along, didn’t you? Father Thomas said demons were attracted to tragedies. Was it my dad, huh? You clung hold of me because of that? Thought you could suck me dry and goad me into offing myself, is that it?”

  


“_Ryan_\--”

  


“..-and then you had the fucking _gall_ to tell me I was wrong for thinking something was up! You sat there and swore left and fucking right that demons and ghosts weren’t real, when you knew goddamn _fucking_ well that I was right!” He’s shouting, but he can hardly hear himself, not over the ring of his own heartbeat echoing between his ears. “But it was you! All along, it was fucking _you_, telling me I don’t have common sense while you were spinning smoke and mirrors just to terrify me! Fuck you, dude! Just-... fuck you. Move out of the way.”

  


“Wait-..”

  


“Shut the fuck up! Move!” Ryan brandishes the knife, fingers curled around the hilt in a white-knuckled grip. 

  


Shane does as he asks, he steps numbly aside, moving into the hallway and taking two long strides down it as if to prove to Ryan that he isn’t about to intercept him. 

  


“Ryan, I just--”

  


“No! I’ve had it with your shit! Shut up, and don’t you dare come after me. I’m keeping the fucking knife until I figure out away to get rid of you. You aren’t fucking human, dude!” 

  


He side-steps awkwardly towards the door, glancing briefly down to make sure he doesn’t trip over Shane’s discarded bag, and when he looks up, he catches a glimpse of his expression, half flanked in shadow from the hallway as the lights spark and splutter around him, struggling to remain illuminated. His hands slowly lower, his features are crumpled with hurt, vaguely pained, utterly desolate. 

  


“Ryan, please--..”

  


It’s the last thing he hears before he slams the door closed behind him. 

  


The knife is hastily stashed in the waistband of his jeans as he hurries down the hall, moving not for the elevators, but for the fire escape which he knows opens out onto the street. There’s little chance of Shane catching him down that route. He shoves the heavy door open and takes the stairs two at a time, one hand balanced upon the railing, prepared to catch his weight and swing his frame around on each landing until he reaches the ground floor. 

  


He pushes the door open and out onto the street beyond, passing the exact spot upon which he’d almost been mugged. He breaks out into a run, not daring to look back at the towering building behind him as he makes for the steep hill that leads down into bleak suburbia, where he knows he’ll be able to find Eugene and the old house. 

  


.xx.  


  


He considers himself lucky to have friends he can go to when he needs them. Friends ready and willing to open their door to him when he shows up on their porch distraught, in tears, and with a knife stashed in his underwear.

  


He considers it lucky that Eugene doesn’t question him. He takes one look at Ryan’s expression, and pulls him in for a hug. His lone query of ‘Are you okay?’ is answered by a nod, and that’s seemingly enough for him. 

  


Ryan is lying in his bed with the duvet pulled up and over his head. He’s curled up as small as he’s able to make himself beneath the covers, blanketed in total darkness, aware of only the beat of his own heart and his thoughts, that torment him more than Shane ever could. 

  


What if all of the stories are true, and angels, demons, werewolves and vampires exist? What if every fairytale, every fanciful legend, every myth, every cardinal sin was true? What if each of these fantastical beings carry on their secretive affairs amongst humans (and mortals) because there’s no other option? How many demons has Ryan met? How many ghosts has he walked alongside? How many angels has he stumbled upon? How did he never realise it sooner? How has humanity remained so blind? Were all the stories of exorcisms and hauntings and blessings true? For a long time, he’d written them off as nonsense, or the ramblings of badly-treated mental illnesses.

  


How did Shane keep it a secret from him for so long?

  


He can hear muffled voices outside the closed door to Eugene’s room. Keith is notoriously bad at keeping his voice down, he has been for as long as Ryan has known him, and he can hear fragments of their conversation. 

  


“...-well is he going to be okay? Should we call someone?” 

  


It’s Eugene who answers. “I tried calling Shane, he didn’t pick up.”

  


“Do you think it has to do with Shane? Could it be something else?”

  


“It’s gotta be Shane. I had a talk with Ryan not long ago about-..”

  


“...about what?”

  


“It’s private. But, I think-... it probably went bad.”

  


Ryan squeezes his eyes shut. He lifts his hands to press his palms over his ears as if that might muffle those voices further. He doesn’t want to think about Shane. He doesn’t want to think about the apartment. He doesn’t want to think about how all of it is making him feel.

  


His emotions feel too visceral. When he had faced loss just a few years ago, it had felt as if a hole had been torn through his chest. It was a pain that he felt through every inch of his frame. A pain that gradually lessened until it felt like that intangible hole was beginning to heal. Every now and then, he would see something, feel something, hear something uttered by a friend or a stranger that would bring the pain back, that would have that hole in his chest tingling as if it was being irritated. The edges would burn and throb, but each time - it would be less. Still, mentions of his dad - even in passing - could knock him breathless. 

  


This is different. It’s a strange kind of pain. An all-encompassing pain. He doesn’t want to face the world. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He wants desperately to leap back in time just three days when he’d sat on this very bed with Eugene, and had his revelation. Things had felt so simple, then- when his biggest dilemma had been how best to approach his newly-discovered feelings for Shane. Feelings that had been there for a lot longer than he’d realised; it feels like some great and untouchable thing, now. Some unattainable version of bliss, because loving the monster always ends badly. 

  


Demons don’t feel love.

  


That’s what he tells himself; over and over-- but it doesn’t ease the ache in his heart. His hands slip from his ears. They clutch close to his chest, as if to guard his heart from further pain. 

  


“...-can’t stay here forever.”

  


“He can have my room.” Eugene says. “I don’t care. He’s my friend.” 

  


He hears the sound of retreating footsteps, followed by a prolonged creak from the floorboards on the other side of the wall, presumably from Keith and Eugene seeking elsewhere to talk. Ryan listens to the beat of his heart. He listens to the idle tapping of rain falling upon the slatted window beside the bed. He listens to the settling noises around him as the wind tugs upon the old house. He falls asleep thinking about how Shane’s arms had felt, wrapped around him upon their balcony.

  


When he wakes, it’s dusk. He’s shifted enough upon the mattress that the blankets have slipped from his features. The door is half open, and Eugene stands by his wardrobe, silently picking out a new shirt from his rack without waking Ryan. 

  


He closes his eyes, feigning sleep until he hears Eugene’s footsteps retreat. When the door closes after him, Ryan’s eyes blink, wearily, open again.

  


He reaches for his phone, fumbling blindly under the many pillows cluttered upon the bed until his fingers scrabble across it. He fishes it free, and unlocks it - squinting against the sudden intrusion of light from the screen. 

  


He has eight missed calls and four text messages. All of them are from Shane. He closes his eyes. That pain in his chest sears through him. It spirals outwards, brittle and sharp. He curls in on himself as if that might somehow ease the ache. With trembling fingers, he opens his inbox. 

  


_ S: Will you please pick up? _

_ S: I just want to know that you’re okay. _

_ S: Ryan, please talk to me. _

_ S: Please pick up.  _

  


He locks his phone again, and stuffs it, furiously, back under the pillows. He throws the blankets back, and clambers clumsily out of the bed; staggering as his blood rushes back to his head and sends his vision askew. 

  


He realises it’s been almost a full day since he’d eaten. 

  


It didn’t matter to him. Nothing at all matters to him. He snatches up Eugene’s key, pushes on his shoes, and starts for the door. Resolute and utterly, utterly determined.

  


.xx.  


  


It’s nearing five in the evening when he makes it to Father Thomas’s parish. The doors are still open, and the very last of its evening visitors are tricking back out and onto the rain-soaked street. It’s a modest building that’s scarcely larger than a suburban home with a white-painted exterior and a comely sign out the front. Its visitors seem to be primarily middle-class and overwhelmingly white. Two women pause mid-step to look at Ryan, stunned, as he threads past them and toward the jittery entranceway. 

  


He’s a sight; with wild hair standing at all angles, rumpled clothes, and red-ringed eyes that belie his true emotions far too plainly. He hasn’t eaten. He’s done little more than sleep and cry since he’d first fled from the apartment. The knife is still tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, as if Shane might arrive at the church at any moment to accost him, to finish the job he’d ostensibly started when they’d moved in together in the first place. 

  


The church is dimly-lit. Candelabras flank the chamber with a faint, golden glow. The altar at the front is being tended to by a single young boy with short-cropped hair, dressed in a white robe that skims the marble floors as he moves. There’s a towering crucifix looming above him, with a larger-than-life rendition of Jesus nailed to his cross, with blood running in rivulets from the palms of his hands, and the soles of his feet. His features are wan, grotesquely distorted in a look of agony, with his eyes half-rolled back. 

  


A single statue of Mary stands behind him. She cuts a pale figure against the bleak picture before him, clad in blue robes, with tears streaming down her solemn features. Her feet are bare, peeking out from beneath the folds of her robes. She is standing on a snake. 

  


Ryan swallows, dryly, as he approaches; gaze affixed to the serpent, and its wide-open jaws. 

  


The altarboy turns towards him as he approaches, sneakers scuffing against the plush red rug swept along the single aisle between the rows of pews. 

  


“Oh.” His voice is timid. “We’re closing for today--”

  


“Is Father Thomas in?” Ryan interrupts, gaze unmoving from the tangled snake. 

  


“I think so.”

  


“Can-... do you think I could see him? It’s important.” 

  


There is a long pause. When the boy doesn’t respond, Ryan tears his gaze away from Mary. He looks down at him, and hurriedly - he obliges. 

  


“Wait one moment.” 

  


He is almost silent as he scurries past Ryan, and hurries off toward a narrow door all but concealed behind a wide tapestry depicting Jesus half-crippled under the burden of the cross. 

  


It’s almost overwhelming to him, this wanton display of complete devotion. Ryan hasn’t ever been one to consider himself overtly religious, but Shane had once pointed out to him that if he believed in demons and ghosts, he must - by extension - also believe in angels. His gaze draws upwards, toward the curved ceiling outfitted with exposed wooden rafters and a vibrant fresco painted across the roof in a poor mimicry of Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgement, splashed across a central wall in the Sistine Chapel; it’s almost violent in its imagery.

  


From his pocket, his phone buzzes - pulling him from his thoughts. He reaches down to slip it out of his pocket, just enough to peer down at the screen. 

  


It’s another message from Shane.

  


_ S: Please come home, Ryan. _

_   
_

The corners of his lips curl down, and Ryan shoves the phone away. He moves his focus toward the altar instead, where a jug of water sits by the remnants of a loaf of bread. He wonders if the water is holy, wonders if he might bribe the altarboy into giving him some..

  


“Mr. Bergara?”

  


He looks up with a start. Father Thomas stands in front of that narrow doorway, his arms folded pleasantly before him, dressed in a blue button down and simple linen slacks - looking more like somebody’s grandfather than a priest. The boy that had been tending the altar returns to his task, and Ryan makes a beeline for the priest without quite meeting his gaze. 

  


“Is everything all right, son? You look harrowed.”

  


“Yeah.” Ryan utters, dismissive; watching as the altarboy passes him. He reaches out to catch his sleeve, and leans down to murmur, “..can you give me some of that holy water?”

  


There is a brief moment when the boy merely stands there, half-surprised and half-amused. With a coy smile, he nods, and slips from Ryan’s grasp.

  


Father Thomas speaks up again, firmer this time, “Would you like to step into my office?”

  


“Yes, please.” 

  


Father Thomas opens a hand to gesture him inside. That little doorway leads into a long corridor, but the very first door to Ryan’s right is already open. 

  


It’s illuminated by artificial light, and it’s no larger than his bedroom back home, in the apartment he shares with Shane. The far wall is largely obscured by another tapestry, with a window that overlooks the yard beyond it with white curtains half-drawn across it. The opposing two walls are cluttered by bookshelves utterly crammed with aged-looking books and old tomes with names that had long ago worn away. There’s a desk in the middle of the room; large and cedar, covered with papers and books and a closed laptop. There’s a mug of still-steaming herbal tea set there, as if Ryan had interrupted the father’s tea break. Two chairs sit across from it, and Ryan cannot help but notice a plain impersonalness to the space. There isn’t a single picture frame. There’s not a single item that must belong to Father Thomas outside from the teacup and laptop. 

  


Ryan wonders what he does when he isn’t tending to his church. 

  


“Have a seat.” He offers, gesturing to one of the two chairs on the other side of the desk. He shuffles around to take a seat behind it, already reaching for his tea. 

  


Ryan settles himself in the leftmost chair, perched rigidly upon the very edge, unsure of where he ought to begin while the father swallows down a sip of his chamomile tea. 

  


“It is most unusual for me to take an appointment without a prior booking. I’m afraid I cannot sit with you for very long.” He explains, slowly. “Is there something I can do for you today?”

  


“Yeah. Sorry. Uh-..” Ryan lifts a hand, skimming his fingers idly through his hair. 

  


“Charlie told me you had an emergency.” He re-iterates. 

  


Ryan grimaces. His hand falls back to his lap.

  


“I have some questions.” He admits, readily. “Related to-.. Uh-... what you came to my apartment for.”

  


“Yes.” Father Thomas brightens ever so slightly. “How did that go?”

  


“Uh.” Ryan blinks. “Not good.”

  


“Oh.”

  


“You said-... you said it was a demon that had taken up residence in the apartment.”

  


“Yes.”

  


“I was-... I was just wondering, um-... is there-... a such thing as a good demon?”

  


Father Thomas blinks. His expression is one that is difficult to discern. A crease appears between his brows. His lips turn down at the corners, and thoughtfully - he shakes his head. 

  


“There is no such thing.” He explains, slowly. “It is their nature to be tricksters and manipulators. It is in their best interest to prey upon humanity. They are evil spirits who carry the execution of Satan’s desires. They are tormentors.”

  


His heart feels as if it’s lodged in his throat. Ryan swallows, thickly- and he nods. 

  


“So there’s-... no chance?”

  


“It’s highly unlikely.”

  


“I thought they were-... fallen angels or some shit.”

  


Father Thomas grimaces, but presses on nonetheless. “Some are. Very old ones are.” 

  


“Okay, then-... how would somebody go about… exorcising a demon?”

  


“Well.” Father Thomas’s frown deepens. “You would need a priest for that. It is a very tedious and precarious subject, even amongst the most experienced.”

  


“What if the demon has-... has inhabited a body for a really long time. Like, years. A lifetime.” Ryan looks up, gaze drawing slowly across the scattered papers littering the priest’s desk, before hitching upwards to meet his stare, evenly; waveringly. He knots his fingers together within his lap, unable to remain still. “What would happen to the host?”

  


Another lengthy silence follows his words. Father Thomas continues to stare at him, searching Ryan’s expression closely, looking from his hooded, red-rimmed gaze to the cut thatched across the crest of his cheek, and his immeasurably rumpled clothes. 

  


“Is everything all right, Ryan?”

  


Ryan draws in a deep and wavering breath, for if anyone is to understand the extent of his predicament, it would be the man sitting opposite him, now. But, Ryan also knows that a great portion of his inner turmoil is perpetuated by his feelings for Shane. 

  


...and he also happens to know what the Catholic church thinks about homosexuality. 

  


“Yeah, it’s fine. You know what-..” He moves to stand, drawing heavily to his feet. “It’s been great. Thanks for taking the time to see me. It really-.. Uh-... helped to clear my head.” He turns, already making for the door, eager to leave- for it suddenly feels stifling, suffocating, supremely uncomfortable and much too cramped. 

  


“Mr. Bergara.”

  


Ryan stops in the doorway. He tips his head back, he taps his index finger to the doorframe, and he half-turns; just enough for his gaze to settle upon the priest, now standing behind his desk, his porcelain teacup held aloft in one hand. 

  


“I implore you, whatever it is you are seeking to do, please remember one thing.”

  


He skims his splayed fingers through his hair, feeling his curls pull and tangle against the ridges of his knuckles. 

  


“What?” he asks, flatly. 

  


“Demons do not have hearts.”

  


.xx.  


  


_ S: Come home. I’m here. I need you. _

_ S: Come back to me. _

_ S: There’s so much I have to tell you. _

_ S: Please come home, Ry. _

  


.xx.  


  


The sky is pink and doffed with pale clouds. Rain falls along the horizon, casting a hazy rainbow against the light thrown by the setting sun in a wild and chromatic display that is almost enough to distract him. 

  


He’s running in his creased trousers and his wrinkled shirt, with a knife bouncing uncomfortably in his pocket, and music blaring through his headphones with the volume set to the absolute maximum in an effort to shut out the rest of the world so that he cannot hear the sound of his own ragged breaths, so that he cannot hear the scuffs of his sneakers against the asphalt. So that he can’t hear the rage of his own heartbeat. He runs until his throat is bone dry. He runs until his calves and thighs ache. Until his lungs burn and his brow is slick with sweat. He runs until the only thing he can think about is how exhausted he is.

  


He has to work. He has to call Andrew. He has to explain this to Eugene. He has to decide what he’s going to do about rent, about his belongings, about Shane-...

  


It falls back upon his shoulders that quickly, and he is almost knocked breathless by it. 

  


His footsteps stall, he slows to a halt, heaving out his breaths, setting his palms upon his parted knees in an effort to catch his breath while his stomach churns and his chest burns. 

  


He’s standing at the edge of a dog park and another suburban street that looks exactly like every other street he’s already passed. There are people here and there, filtering in and out of the park while Ryan gasps for breath by the shrubbery, head half-cradled in his hands as it pounds. 

  


It hits him suddenly. It hits him like a pound of bricks. As if the asphalt beneath his feet falls away so that the earth might swallow him up; so that he might be pulled down to Hell, tainted forever for daring to fall in love with a demon. 

  


Love. When did it become _love_?

  


He falls forwards, stomach lurching forwards abruptly, palms and knees scraping against the cement beneath him as his head spins and a distant ringing fills his ears. He’s sick into the undergrowth, onto the grass.

  


_ Some things are too terrible to grasp all at once. _

_   
_

.xx.  


  


_ S: I miss you. I’m waiting for you. Please come home. I’ll be here whenever you’re ready. _

_ S: I’m so sorry. I promise I won’t hurt you. _

_ S: I hope you know I’d never hurt you. _

_   
_

.xx.  


  


It is a strange and ephemeral mix of immense loneliness and visceral agony that he hasn’t experienced before. When he lost his dad, he felt alone. He wanted a kind of comfort that only his missing parental figure could give him, but there were still people around him who understood, who knew what he was going through, who were also going through the exact same thing. There were those who didn’t understand, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to comfort him, but he didn’t have to hide his pain. He wasn’t alone, not for a single part of it.

  


He feels like the guardian of a great and terrible secret, standing at the precipice between the mundane and the supernatural, unable to confide in a single living soul. Who would believe him, and if they did - how would they help him? What if they sought only to have Shane exorcised? What if they drove Ryan to the nearest hospital just to have him institutionalised? His heart sinks at the mere thought. 

  


The person he’d go to with this, unquestionably, is Shane. The person he’d run to first to show his undeniable proof of a demon existing is Shane. 

  


It’s a cruel twist of fate that Shane is his living proof of the supernatural. 

  


He’s had three days to consider his options, to call in sick to work until Andrew asks him sincerely if he needs company, to rebuff Eugene’s attempts at cheering him up, to avoid more of Shane’s calls. There is one question that falls to the forefront of his mind each time he considers just what to do. 

  


Why hasn’t Shane sought him out?

  


Why hasn’t Shane killed him?

  


Ryan could call Mandy. He could tell her everything-- that her son is possessed by a diabolical spirit, that he isn’t (and hasn’t been) the boy she gave birth to. He could tell Eugene, he could track down Shane’s previous partner, and ask her just what it was about him that she found so draining. Did she know? How much did she know? What did she do when she found out? Did he kill her? What a great and terrible secret to uncover about somebody you must love. 

  


Did it destroy her as much as it’s destroying Ryan?

  


It’s six-thirty in the evening when Eugene pushes open the door to his bedroom, and throws a clean bath towel at Ryan, who is sitting - cross legged - upon the edge of his bed. 

  


“Get up.” He states, flatly. “Have a shower. Clean yourself up. Brush your teeth. Make an effort. Then, go sort out your shit with Shane.” 

  


“Eugene--”

  


“Don’t give me that shit.” He holds up a stern hand, features schooled into a cold look of quiet irritation. “You can’t hide away from your problems here forever. I mean you can, but you gotta move in and pay rent if that’s what you want to do.”

  


Ryan’s shoulders drop. A cold and tremendous feeling of utter dread settles in upon him, too close and too cruel, an icy reminder that a whole world exists beyond the old walls of this familiar house, and that he can’t keep shutting himself away from it. 

  


“Fine.” He mutters, curling his fingers in the fluffy towel pooled in his lap. 

  


“Unless.” Eugene starts, leaning against the doorframe, and folding his arms carefully across his chest. “You want to start telling me what happened?”

  


Ryan looks up, brows lifting, inquisitively. 

  


Eugene abruptly straightens. He moves into the room, and he delicately closes the door behind him. 

  


“Did you tell him you had feelings for him?”

  


Ryan blinks, a denial perched upon the tip of his tongue, but he swallows it back, he lies instead - because it’s easier, it’s simpler. It’ll keep Eugene from asking too many questions. 

  


“Yeah.” He shrugs, lightly.

  


“He didn’t feel the same way?”

  


“Uh, no. No, he didn’t.” Ryan shakes his head. 

  


“Ah. Shit. That really sucks. I honestly thought he was into you. I really thought it was a sure thing, y’know?”

  


“Yeah.” Ryan nods, looking down at the rumpled towel, again. 

  


“You don’t-... sound that broken up about it, dude.” Eugene continues, brows drawing together into a small frown. 

  


“I am. I’m-... still processing it, that’s all. I don’t really know how friendships survive this kind of thing, y’know? It really changes the way you look at someone and probably the way they look at you. It’s a-... dynamic-changing kinda thing.”

  


“Yeah.” Again, Eugene shrugs. “You guys lived together for six months before you came out with how you felt. Shane might be a bit oblivious at times, but he’s not a dick. He’s the furthest thing from a dick. If you just talk to him, you’ll have a better idea about where things stand. Isn’t it better to know if it won’t work out now, rather than torturing yourself over it?” 

  


Ryan is silent as he considers Eugene’s words. He doesn’t know the full scope of the situation, but his advice is nonetheless helpful. He needs to retrieve his belongings (his clothes, his computer, his sneakers) one way or another. He needs his work uniform and his pass, he needs his phone charger so that he doesn’t have to keep borrowing Ned’s while he sleeps. He plucks at the towel. 

  


“Okay.” He draws in a deep breath. “I’m gonna shower. Then, I’ll go talk to him.”

  


.xx.  


  


The streets are illuminated by the glow of a dozen street lamps, flooding the thatched concrete with a dull, orange-toned light that carries wisps of ardent mist along a threadbare breeze that prickles at the nape of Ryan’s neck, and tugs at the tips of his still-damp hair, fragrant with the scent of Eugene’s shampoo. He feels despondent, catatonic, a lone silhouette wandering an uphill street on some wretched and holy pilgrimage. His gaze remains low, counting his steps as the slope of the hill eases. He crosses the road without looking either way, and slows his pace considerably as he passes the tinted garage door where he had nearly been mugged. The newly-mended scar along his cheek prickles as if in memory, and he lifts a hand to run two fingers along the length of it. His heart misses a beat. He has to brace himself against the metal door just to keep his knees from buckling as a fresh bout of pain rockets through him. 

  


Ryan closes his eyes. He pulls in a steadying breath. He touches the little vial of holy water given to him by the altar boy on his way out of Father Thomas’s parish. He feels the hilt of the old bread knife answer the curve of his thumb, and he feels reassured. 

  


Slowly, he draws his eyes open again. His hand falls away from the garage door. He presses on, moving for the brightly-lit automatic doors into their complex, bathing in the golden glow and warmth offered by the interior as he moves for the elevators, and reaches out with an unsteady hand to press the up arrow. 

  


His breaths come shallow and halting. His stomach has wound itself into knots. His chest feels inexplicably tight. His nerves stand on-end. Fear clouds his judgement. He’s always been afraid of the unknown, and here he is - walking into the arms of it as if it might offer him salvation. 

  


The elevator doors slide open, and Ryan is gifted a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror that isn’t clouded by the steam of Eugene’s shower. 

  


Deep, purple rings sit beneath his eyes. He’s pallid and wan, with a pink scar thatched across the crest of his cheek covered over by a haggard scab. His hair is still wet, half-curled and wayward. His crew-neck shirt is rumpled and worn with a hole by the sleeve. He looks like he’s been crying for a week straight (and he has), with red-rimmed eyes that are bloodshot and tired.

  


He closes his eyes. He steps forwards, reaching out blindly to push the button he knows will take him to the right floor. 

  


The doors glide closed after him, and he turns his back upon his reflection, unwilling to look at himself any longer. He dips a hand into his pocket, reaching for the holy water and the knife. He takes one in each hand, gripping the cool vial close- wondering, however distantly, if it will even do him any good, if the knife will even be enough to stop him. 

  


Shane isn’t human.

  


The elevator offers a merry _ding! _

  


The doors glide open onto the corridor, illuminated in gold with artistic renditions of a dozen and one landscapes Ryan hasn’t ever seen hung upon the plain walls. He moves out of the elevator, and he pauses there - standing in the middle of the hallway that somehow feels undeniably safer than whatever is waiting for him inside his apartment. 

  


Maybe this is purgatory. Some in-between place that is neither heaven nor hell for humans who are neither good nor bad. Any ‘good’ points Ryan has racked up have been undeniably tainted by Shane’s presence in his life, he knows that now. 

  


Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he has the choice. Heaven is to his right and Hell is to his left; with Shane and everything that he knows that’s familiar. How ironic, he thinks bitterly, that its found its home here, so high up in the sky.

  


His hands are shaking. His mouth is dry. His heart is fluttering like a terrified and caged bird, desperate for freedom. He knows his answer. If he had a choice between Heaven and Hell, he knows where he’d rather be. 

  


Ryan turns left. He starts down the hallway, passing the dulled picture frames and the lamps built into the walls. His footsteps are muffled by the plush carpet underfoot. A sharp thrill tips down the steps of his spine. His breaths come shallow and halting and he thinks back to the figure outside his window, the empirical presence that had pinned him to his mattress, the planchette that had moved on its own, the blown fuzes, the silhouette outside his door, and Shane’s vehement denials of everything, everything, everything..

  


He reaches their door. He doesn’t have a key. He shifts the holy water into his right hand, and he reaches out with his left to test the doorknob. 

  


It gives under the press of his fingers, unlocked - as if Shane knew he was coming. 

  


His stomach drops. His heart lurches sharply; with fear, with anticipation, with some misplaced desperation just to see him again.

  


Ryan pushes the door open. He straightens his shoulders, he eases the holy water back into his hand, and steps inside; ready to face his demon. 

  


Darkness answers him. 

  


The balcony light offers the only reprieve from blackness, shining a silver glow in from the night beyond, curelly juxtaposed against the expected norm of their shared home. The space is as clean as Ryan had left it. It’s spotless. It doesn’t look as if a single soul has set foot in it since he left. His gaze strays towards the kitchen, to where he’d dropped the phone to the tiles, where it had shattered. 

  


It’s gone. It’s re-assembled and sitting upon its hook on the bench; as if it had never been disassembled, as if it had never been dropped. 

  


Ryan ventures silently forwards; eyes straining against the dark, for everything before him feels silhouetted by the balcony light, half-visible and mostly intangible, like Shane.

  


There is movement to his right. It stirs out of the peripherals of his vision. He goes rigid, he lifts the knife in a single and sharp movement. His heart stutters. His breath catches. The gleam of his knife in the lambent half-dark is striking and silver. 

  


He’s there, standing at the mouth of the hallway, blanketed in darkness and only half illuminated by the silver glow of the balcony light. It dapples across one side of his face, igniting his sharp features more plainly than ever. He’s dressed in a black button-up with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a plain pair of jeans. He looks tired. Ryan can only see one part of him, and he looks tired. There are deep circles under his down-turned eyes, his hair is dishevelled and messy, he looks like he hasn’t shaved since Ryan left; and he holds immeasurably still.

  


“Ryan.” His voice is soft. It’s earnest. It’s cultivating as much desperation as Ryan feels.

  


“Don’t move.” It’s the first thing that leaves him, and Ryan doesn’t lower his knife. 

  


“I wasn’t going to.” Shane reassures, fingers splaying idly at his sides. 

  


“I have holy water.” Ryan says, voice quaking. 

  


“Oh.” Shane blinks, and nods once; almost in understanding. “That’s nice. It’s good to be prepared.” 

  


He holds true to his words. He doesn’t move from his place at the mouth of the hallway; but Ryan can feel his gaze upon him, heavy, expectant, filled with relief and almost-black in the darkness. His hard breathing seems too loud, the walls feel too close, the apartment feels inexplicably too small for them. 

  


“You’re really scared.” Shane breathes out, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  


“Shut up.” Ryan hisses back. “I’m just-... I’m trying to think. I didn’t-... I didn’t come here with a plan. Eugene just told me to talk to you, and I-...”

  


“You told Eugene?” For a moment, he sounds fearful. 

  


“No. I made up-... some bullshit.” He feels a thrum of heat flood to his cheeks, and he feels immeasurably foolish for it. Now isn’t the time. “I didn’t tell anyone. I should’ve. You deserve this shit, I shouldn’t be dealing with this.”

  


“No. You shouldn’t. I never wanted this to happen, you know.” he continues, voice frustratingly level. 

  


“What did you want to happen?” Ryan asks. “Were you just going to lie to me forever?”

  


“Forever?” Shane echoes, and Ryan sees the very first hint of a smile around his utterance of the world, as if placated somewhat by the insinuation that they’d be together for that long. “I’ve never wanted to tell anybody the truth about this. People tend to-... pick the truth that they believe in. But, if there has ever been anybody that I wanted to tell, it’s been you.”

  


“Why me?”

  


“You’re different.” Shane tells him, earnestly, quietly. “It’s-... difficult to explain, Ryan. But, you made it clear to me that nothing frightens you more than ghosts and demons. Especially demons. I couldn’t bare the thought of revealing the truth to you, and then losing you forever by being the very thing you were so afraid of.”

  


“You nearly did.”

  


“I know.” Shane takes a step forwards, and stops dead in his tracks when Ryan bristles, flinches, grips onto the knife tighter. “Sorry. I know-... that’s why I wanted to-... explain myself.”

  


“Then explain.” He insists. “I’ve been doing the fucking talking for so long. Now it’s your goddamn turn.”

  


“I-...” Shane breathes a strained sigh. He averts his gaze. “What do you want to know?”

  


Ryan blinks. He draws in a deep breath, and for a moment, he considers. 

  


“What are you?”

  


“Technically speaking? I’m Shane Madej.”

  


“_What_, not who.”

  


“I’m a demon.” He offers, simply, but before Ryan can continue, he presses on hastily, “But, we’ve been wildly misrepresented in media and in scriptures. I don’t want to sound too much like I’m trying to excuse my actions, but we’ve gotten a bad rap.”

  


“How?” Ryan frowns. “You’re an evil spirit, a malevolent being, an angel cast out of heaven. How the fuck can you be misrepresented?”

  


“Yes. Well. That’s all true. It’s a Greek word, you know? ‘Demon’. Initially, it didn’t carry any negative connotations along with it. It was just a word for a spirit or a being of divine power. Plato wrote about us first.”

  


“Is that why you like history so fucking much?”

  


“Well-... partially, yeah.”

  


“Would an exorcism work on you?”

  


Shane hesitates. He blinks, and any hint of a smile that had been left upon his lips abruptly melts away. 

  


“Yes.”

  


“What would happen if you were exorcised?”

  


“I would die.” 

  


Ryan’s heart misses a beat. He forgets to breathe. 

  


“Well, I suppose I’d be braindead.” He continues, “The-... accident that mum told you about,”

  


Ryan’s frown deepens, and he shakes his head once, trying to push past the notion of a demon referring to somebody to whom he bore no relation as his mother. Wordlessly, he gestures toward Shane - or rather, the vessel that contains him, “Did he die?”

  


“Yeah. Internal bleeding.” Shane offers by way of explanation. “He was a vacant vessel. It was like moving into an abandoned building. There were things to fix, and certain expectations that I had to meet, but-..”

  


Ryan thinks back to meeting Mandy. He thinks back to how she had laughed at Shane’s jokes, to how she had gazed at him with a look so filled with fondness and pride. He thinks back to their interactions, to how he’d opened the door for her, pulled her chair back for her, paid for her coffee for her, upheld the charade of a doting and loving son-...

  


Because he _is_ one. 

  


“How much of this is you?” He asks, then.

  


Again, Shane pauses. His throat shifts as he visibly swallows, harrowed and on-edge and visibly fumbling despite his calm tone. “All of it. I’m still me, Ryan. Outside of the supernatural shit, I haven’t lied to you about a single thing.” 

  


“Did you want to kill me?”

  


Again, he pauses. He drops his gaze. He shifts where he stands. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and Ryan re-adjusts his grip upon the knife. 

  


“This is what I mean when-... when I say that you’re different. I’ve come across a lot of people in my time here. We feed off energies, namely fear, anger, envy and hatred. It’s almost like being a vampire, only it isn’t blood that we drain, it’s energy. It’s why-... you always felt so tired when we would spend a lot of time together. You feel things, Ryan, and you feel them so deeply. Your version of fear is ten times as potent as an ordinary person’s. Your version of anger is a thousand times more profound than an ordinary person.”

  


Ryan lowers the knife an inch, “Is there something wrong with me?”

  


A short and disbelieving laugh tips past Shane’s lips. “I’m telling you that I’m an energy-vampire, and you think there’s something wrong with _you?”_

  


“I don’t know, dude. I’m new to this shit, as you can fucking see.” Ryan gestures to himself with the hand holding his holy water. “Keep talking.”

  


Shane holds up both of his hands as if in surrender. “It’s a little bit like alcohol, I suppose. Some people are more predisposed to a certain kind, or they prefer one taste to another. It’ll affect them differently. Different people’s emotions have different effects. You are just the first that I have come across to… impact me like this. It made me want to be around you all the time. I could get drunk off it. It was enough to satisfy me for days. But, I got greedy. I could see how it was damaging you, and yet I kept doing it. I’ve never had something like that. I’ve never felt so satisfied before. It was addicting.”

  


Shane takes a thoughtless step towards him. The balcony light falls across his frame, illuminating his features in a stark and silver glow. Ryan stiffens all over again, and Shane falls still again, holding up his hands once more as if to show that he means no harm. Slowly, he shakes his head, as if internally reigning himself in. 

  


“...-so I tried to stop. I could feel you getting suspicious. I tried to scare you in other ways that would better appeal to you. You wanted the apartment to be haunted, so I tried to make it haunted.”

  


“It worked.” Ryan murmurs, eyes over wide. 

  


“I know.” Shane’s smile is almost apologetic.

  


“So, the-... face in my window, the shadow outside my door, the sleep paralysis-..? Was it all-...?”

  


Shane nods, slowly; expression wrought with uncertainty, as if admitting to it alone is enough to pain him. 

  


“It felt like a win for both of us. I could feel how excited it made you. You got a viral video. I got my fill of you for a week.” 

  


Ryan shudders. Swallowing down the heat that - once more - threatens to envelop him. 

  


“How much of it can you feel? Is it every emotion, or only the ones that you can-..” He wrinkles his nose, searching for the correct term. “..-eat?”

  


Shane’s lips twitch with the threat of a smile. 

  


“Everything.” 

  


Again, Ryan’s heart lurches. He thinks back to the blown fuze, to the flickering lights that had dipped and spluttered only twice; once when Ryan had confronted him, and again when he had been alone, in bed, in the dark-- horny and tired. 

  


He shoves that thought aside. 

  


“You didn’t answer my question, though.” Ryan continues, slowly. “Did you want to kill me?”

  


“No.” Shane’s answer is immediate. “I never want to kill anybody. If I can get by like this, then I will. There isn’t some big diabolical plan, and Satan isn’t whispering directly into my ear, telling me who next to murder. I’m not here to bring about the end of days. I don’t hear an awful lot from the big guy downstairs. I almost think he might have forgotten that he left me here.”

  


“So-... you’re good?”

  


Shane’s smile broadens. “No.” He says, earnestly. “I thrive on people’s fear, Ryan. I terrify them, and I feed off them until they are exhausted. If I didn’t, I would cease to exist.”

  


Slowly, Ryan lowers the knife, shifting back a step. Shane’s gaze lingers on it for a moment longer, but he doesn’t move from where he stands, all but motionless with his hands at his sides. 

  


“Are angels real?” Ryan dares. 

  


Again, Shane laughs. “Gut feelings are guardian angels. I think that’s the closest you’ll get.” 

  


“So you’re still gonna be an insufferable dick about some of this shit, huh?” Ryan asks, flatly. 

  


“It’s what I do best, man.” Shane rebuffs, smile drawn into a casual and too-familiar grin that sends a flood of warmth blooming through Ryan’s chest. 

  


... a feeling Shane would no doubt feel.

  


Ryan clears his throat. He shifts back enough to lean against the wall beside their TV, eyes still upon Shane despite how much he wants to lie down in his familiar bed, in his familiar apartment. 

  


“Do you have more questions?” Shane asks, tentatively. 

  


“Yeah.” Ryan lifts his chin. “Are you immortal?”

  


“I am.” Shane nods. “This body isn’t. I’ll age just like every other person, and when it expires, I’ll have to find somewhere else to go.”

  


“That sounds exhausting.” Ryan murmurs. “How many people have you been before you were this one?”

  


“None.” Shane answers, simply. “I’m-... new here. I’m still learning about humanity. I’m learning how to be human every day. Sometimes I get worried that people know I’m in the wrong dimension. I don’t like priests for that reason. It feels as if they can look right into my soul, and see that it’s tainted. I like it here a great deal. People are very interesting. Humans are kinder and more curious than others say. I’d rather stay for-... for as long as I can.”

  


“We’re getting slandered in Hell, huh?”

  


Shane’s smile is faint. “Something like that.”

  


“I should’ve picked up on this sooner, man. I always knew you were fucking weird, I just assumed it was because you were an asshole, not because you’re some-... preternatural being. What can you do? Like magic and shit?”

  


“I can make you think that you see things.” Shane offers, offhandedly. “When I’m energised, I can do it a little better. I can also move things if I put my mind to it, but it’s very hard and exhausting and not always worth the trouble.”

  


“So, if I wanna change the channel without getting up or turn on the heater without getting up..?”

  


He rolls his eyes, and Ryan bites back a smile. 

  


“Theoretically, yes I could do it for you, but I’d need a nap afterwards.”

  


“That sucks, dude.”

  


Shane laughs. “Thanks.”

  


“When you saved me from the muggers, did you freak them out?”

  


Shane’s grin is knowing, it’s impish and coy. He looks down at his feet, splaying his toes within his socks as he considers how best to word his response. 

  


“Yes. We don’t need to discuss what I made them see.” 

  


“One more.” Ryan says, “Are there others like you?”

  


That has his gaze lifting. His brows perk up, and his lips part with a gentle click of his tongue in thought. 

  


“There are.” He murmurs, nodding gently. “Not very many, but there are. I can only guess based on stories that I’ve read. Very few cases of demons are real, I tend to believe the older we get, the more malevolent.”

  


Ryan’s stomach twists at that. 

  


“I have never met another one.” He admits, quietly. “I think I would like to someday. But, I’m perfectly content to exist alone for now. I like this little life I’ve built for myself. Work can be a little tiring sometimes, but if I don’t feel like handling my boss on a certain day, I can make him very tired, very quickly. He’s a very angry guy.”

  


A quiet laugh tips past Ryan’s parted lips. “It doesn’t get lonely, though? Having this big secret that you can’t tell anyone?”

  


Shane shakes his head, placid smile back in place, gaze immeasurably soft as he regards him, “I’ve told you.” He points out, gently. “It was lonely for a long time. It isn’t anymore.”

  


“When did it stop feeling like that?”

  


“Around the time that we moved in together.” Shane admits, “You didn’t know, but sometimes I could pretend that you did, and that you put up with me despite it. I never feel alone when I’m with you.” 

  


That same expanding warmth pushes outwards through Ryan’s chest. It spirals through him, dousing what’s left of his residual fear in a gentle and velveteen fire that feels like a gust of warmth after hours spent in the cold. It’s all-encompassing and reassuring and right.

  


“Can I come closer, now?” Shane asks, voice scarcely more than a whisper. 

  


Ryan straightens from the wall. His grip on the knife doesn't ease. 

  


He nods. 

  


Shane’s strides are quick; three elongated steps and he’s in front of Ryan, crowding into his space, looming over him like a dark shadow, omnipotent and vile and wretched. Wretched and beautiful, wretched and beautiful, wretchedly beautiful. 

  


Ryan’s breath stutters past his lips in a slow and shaky exhale. Fingers card idly through the downy hair at the nape of his neck, they settle beneath his chin, gently guiding his gaze upwards until it meets Shane’s in the ardent half-dark, with a flash of silver light between them that fills the gulf with too much fullness. Ryan can hear the beat of his own heart ringing in his ears. He can feel the unsteadiness to his hands, still gripping the knife and the holy water tightly, as if Shane could turn, as if his fingers might coil about Ryan’s throat to squeeze the life out of him, to steal it away despite his promises to the contrary. 

  


His familiar cologne washes over him, warm and heady and tinted with mint. Ryan lifts a hand to settle his closed fist against Shane’s chest, where he feels the slow beat of his heart, methodical and firm and real. 

  


This demon has a heart. 

  


He leans down, hunching forwards towards him, nudging the tip of his nose into the side of Ryan’s as if to give him a moment, a chance, a reprieve to pull away if he wants to - but Ryan doesn’t. 

  


He lifts onto his toes, he tips his chin upwards and out of Shane’s fingertips, he meets his lips firmly and with vigour. He feels Shane exhale, hard, as if he’s been holding his breath and waiting for this moment. He surges into Ryan, planting an open palm upon the wall above Ryan’s shoulder, pressing him close, crowding him into it until there’s nowhere for him to go but into the kiss. 

  


The holy water slips from his fingers and falls, uselessly, to the carpet. His fingers card listlessly through Shane’s hair, pulling and tugging and settling at the collar of his button-down shirt that tapers the tilt of his waist a little too wonderfully. 

  


The kiss is sharp and wanting, it’s desperate and inexplicable. It’s lips and tongue and filthy in its desperateness. There’s no part of it that is tentative nor gentle. Shane tastes like toothpaste and relief. He’s warm and visceral and kissing Ryan with every ounce of his being, with every inch of his lanky frame. 

  


An arm sweeps about the sway of his back, pulling him closer until their chests press flush, until Ryan’s arm whisks around the length of Shane’s shoulders, still gripping the knife tightly. It’s sharp and it’s wanting and it’s weighty with too many implications, things that Ryan doesn’t have in him to discern, but when the kiss breaks, they are both breathless. 

  


It’s Shane who speaks first, lips skimming the still-healing cut embossed into the cusp of Ryan’s cheek. 

  


“You feel exhausted.” He murmurs. “You should rest.”

  


“Ah.” Ryan’s lips part into a too-wide grin. “You predicting all my emotions is gonna get fucking old fast, isn’t it?”

  


.xx.  


  


“So, what happened?” 

  


Eugene is standing at the doorway to his bedroom, arms folded tightly across his chest, smile broad and expectant, hair mussed (but artfully so), with Keith lingering to his right; watching Ryan collect his belongings from where they’ve been strewn about his borrowed bedroom. 

  


“Nothing.” Ryan rebuffs, as cooly and casually as he dares- despite the warmth flooding to his cheeks. 

  


“Oh, he’s blushing!” Keith points out, grinning much too wide. 

  


“Of course he’s blushing. That’s what you do after you’ve been railed in the ass by your best fri--”

  


Ryan scrambles, reaching for one of the many pillows piled high upon Eugene’s bed. He hurls it, wordlessly, towards him; laughing as it bounces off the doorframe and thumps uselessly to the floor in front of Keith.

  


“Shut up!” He snaps, despite his grin. 

  


“You don’t get to come into our house and act like we’re out of line for being worried about you, dude. We have the right to know!” Keith states, clearly and emphatically, with his left hand extended and poised before him.

  


“Yeah.” Eugene adds, pointedly. “Start talking, before I lock you in here and demand that you pay rent for the days you stayed here. Don’t think I didn’t keep track, because I did, bitch.”

  


“Fine.” Ryan deflates, shirts and jeans bundled in his left hand. He sits, heavily upon the edge of the bed. “There isn’t much to tell, though.”

  


“Fine.” Keith slides past Eugene to move further into the room. “I like short stories just as much as I like long ones.” He tosses one of Eugene’s sweaters off one of the plump bean bags pushed against the wall by his wardrobe, and he sits upon it, all limbs and shoelaces. He gestures, wordlessly, for Ryan to begin. 

  


“We kissed.” Ryan offers, blandly. 

  


“Tongue?” Keith asks. 

  


“Yeah.” Ryan blinks. “A-... a bit, I mean-..”

  


“A bit?” Eugene steps forwards. “What?”

  


“I don’t know how much detail you want me to give here, dude. It’s kind of private.”

  


“Are you like an item now?” He asks, inching closer. 

  


“I-... don’t know. We didn’t exactly have that talk.”

  


“Yeah.” Keith mutters, “Too busy with your tongues in each other’s throats. Makes talking kind of hard.”

  


“Why not?” Eugene asks, barely pausing to acknowledge Keith’s words. 

  


“I dunno. It just-... I was tired. So was he. So we just-... called it a night.”

  


“Did you sleep in the same bed again?” Eugene asks.

  


“Wait, you guys have been sleeping together, and I didn’t know about it?” Keith interjects.

  


“No. We didn’t. We just-... got through some stuff. It felt like it was too soon for that, again. We gotta work up to it and stuff. I’m not ready. Maybe he’s not--”

  


“What do you want out of this, Ryan?” Eugene straightens, “Do you want to be just friends?”

  


“I-...” Ryan pauses, he considers it. He thinks back over his last conversation with Eugene, about how the intricacies of his and Shane’s relationship operated, and how - to an outsider - they acted every bit like a couple. The idea of Shane being romantically involved with somebody else makes Ryan’s stomach twist in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar way. 

  


“I don’t think so.”

  


“Then you need to make that clear to him.” Eugene says, “Or you’re gonna be stuck in an unending, ineffable cycle. You’re both grown adults. It’s time to start talking about feelings in a more mature way. Avoidance isn’t going to get anybody anywhere.”

  


Ryan sits back. He looks down at his hands; at his rumpled jeans and his torn shirt, silently introspective. 

  


..because he knows that Eugene is right. 

  


.xx.  


  


It’s six-thirty on Tuesday evening, and Ryan is sitting cross-legged upon the floor, with his laptop perched upon the edge of the coffee table, and a mug of half-drunk camomile tea cradled in his hands as he stares at the screen before him. There’s an old research paper open on the webpage in front of him, with Google translate open upon his phone, nestled in his lap, prepared to translate the many Latin phrases riddled throughout the work into English. 

  


There’s a lot he didn’t know. Ryan hasn’t ever read the Bible. This apartment is the first residence he’s ever lived in that didn’t have a copy of it stashed somewhere, and considering his current circumstances (with Shane’s predicament) that makes sense. There are countless quotes throughout the Bible, but the one with the most to say seems to be Corinthians. None of the phrases nor anecdotes are good, each of them paints demons out to be meddling, mischievous agents of chaos that fester with pigs and sulfur. It’s hard to draw a comparison between the monstrous beings written about with such visceral imagery in the Bible, to calm and collected Shane; who likes old history books, popcorn, swing music and vintage films. 

  


The door to the bathroom draws open with a swirl of steam, and Shane emerges in an old t-shirt and a pair of worn sweats. His hair is damp and sticking to the nape of his neck, swept back from his angular features as he moves, slowly, back into the kitchen. He crouches to peer into the tinted oven at the pie still browning within, before loping wordlessly over toward the couch, where Ryan sits upon the floor, to have a seat. He instinctively fishes for the remote as Ryan picks up his phone again to type out another quoted Latin phrase. 

  


“What are you reading?” Shane asks, switching on the television with the remote.

  


“Nothin’.” Ryan mutters, frowning down at his phone. 

  


“Corinthians?” Shane leans forwards, squinting at his laptop screen. 

  


Ryan reaches forwards, and clumsily snaps his laptop shut. 

  


“Don’t bother with that yarn.” Shane says, sitting back. “It’s very biased.”

  


“What d’you mean?” Ryan locks his phone, and twists his head to look up at Shane as he absently flicks through the channels. 

  


“It’s like what they say with war in history. It’s written by the winners. You get a very biased account.”

  


“Where’s the Satan-side of the bible, then?”

  


The corners of Shane’s lips twitch. “We’ve got more important things to do.” 

  


Wordlessly, Ryan clambers onto the couch to sit beside him. He folds his legs up and leans back, watching as Shane gives up on cable television, and loads into Netflix instead. 

  


“Have you ever read the bible?” He asks him, watching their reflection in the dark screen as the bold red logo of the streaming service appears before them. 

  


“Enough of it.” Shane muses, draping an arm along the back of the couch. “‘The Spirit clearly says that in later times, some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons’. Timothy, 4:1.”

  


“Should I trust Timothy?” Ryan asks. “Are you deceiving me?”

  


Shane’s smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

  


“I wouldn’t dare.”

  


.xx.  


  


It’s little things at first, but none of it escapes Ryan’s notice. 

  


Shane starts by leaving for work in the mornings before Ryan even leaves the shower. He comes home later and later, until one night - he simply doesn’t come home at all. Ryan’s texts go unanswered, and he goes to bed at ten, listening to the dead silence around him as if some creak in the hallway, some thud in the bathroom might soothe him. 

  


He doesn’t text during the day. He doesn’t spend the weekend at home. He doesn’t ask Ryan if he’s free to see a film, if he’d like to visit a bar, if he’d like to go for a walk, or try a coffee at this new cafe. He does none of the usual, normal, expected Shane things that Ryan has come to hope for. He doesn’t make eye contact, he doesn’t begin conversation, he shies away when Ryan reaches out; as if he’s on the opposite end of some ineffable push-pull. It’s as if the past week hadn’t occurred at all, and Ryan’s presence had become something he can no longer stand.

  


It’s painful. It’s confusing. It feels as though Shane had promised him one thing, and then done the opposite. It has him wishing he’d never left the old house. It has him wishing he’d taken up Keith’s offer after all, and moved back into his old room until something more concrete came up, with a stranger-- someone he doesn’t know. Someone he doesn’t have feelings for. Someone who won’t ice him out. 

  


Someone who isn’t a preternatural being sent from the depths of Hell. 

  


Nobody ever told him that he’d fall in love with a demon. Nobody ever prepared him for how it would feel. Nobody ever reassured him how it would end. He’s ready countless stories about princes and princesses weaving intricate and beautiful love stories that end in old age, with dozens of grandchildren and open canyons filled with peaceful sunsets. Love had always been painted as something holy, something sacred, something marked by chivalrous nights, virtuous maidens and gentle lovers. He’d never paused to consider it could ever be some wretchedly beautiful thing taught by demons. The scriptures and parables and poems and tales never taught him what to do when a human falls in love with a demon. 

  


He wonders often if this truly had been a manipulation. He wonders if Shane had orchestrated the entire thing simply to brand his soul as damned. It feels like some unspoken act of true cruelty. To offer a kiss so passionate, and then to become a ghost before the sun might rise. 

  


He drifts down the hallway of their shared apartment late in the evening on Sunday. The cool night breathes an icy exhale against the window at the foot of the hallway, seething an arctic breeze onto the floorboards that tickles at his toes as he slows to a halt outside Shane’s room. 

  


The door is closed, and he isn’t home. He won’t be, not until long after midnight. Ryan wonders where he goes when he’s absent for the majority of the night, but a mortal shouldn’t be privy to the affairs of the extra-terrestrial, he tells himself. The bitterness that thought spurns is what drives him forwards. He reaches out with a sure hand to push the door to Shane’s bedroom open, and he steps, wordlessly, inside. He reaches out to turn on the light, and blinks against the sudden, golden glow that illuminates the space. 

  


His room is a mess. 

  


The bed is unmade. Clothes are strewn across the floor. His button-down and slacks hang upon a single coat-hanger hooked upon the back of his door, supposedly so that tomorrow’s outfit won’t be rumpled when he needs it. The doors to his wardrobe are open. There are books open across his desk, and the curtains are drawn back against his windows. They’re open wide, allowing the cold night air to drift, silently, inside. Ryan shudders, stepping forwards and picking his way over the mess to pull the windows closed with hasty fingers. 

  


There’s a single vial of holy water sitting upon the sill, half-veiled behind the curtains that billow as Ryan hauls the window the last inch of the way closed. He blinks down at it, equal parts disbelieving and surprised. It’s a familiar bottle. The very same bottle he’d swindled off an altar boy in Father Thomas’ parish. 

  


Wordlessly, he picks it up. A thin layer of ice has formed across the surface, but a good inch of liquid is missing from within. 

  


“What the fuck…?” Ryan murmurs, tucking the vial into his palm, feeling the last dregs of guilt at snooping where he didn’t belong firmly dispell with this new discovery. 

  


Silently, he turns to take his leave-- pausing at the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed - right by Shane’s door - where a picture sits within a simple, wooden frame. It’s a photo of the two of them, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed with alcohol, smiles wide and hazy, holding a schooner of beer each on their first night out together after they’d finished furnishing their apartment. Shane had asked the bartender to take the photo. He’d slid in close to Ryan in the booth, and draped his arm across the back of their seat. 

  


He’d never told Ryan that he got the photo printed. That he went out of his way to frame it. 

  


Silently, Ryan slips from the room. The holy water draws a cold line across the inverse of his palm. The picture of the two of them from the bar sears its image into his mind. 

  


He plans to confront him.

  


.xx.  


  


He spends the day dodging questions from Andrew who knows how to read him like a book with its pages sprawled wide open. He’s distracted, half-present and left asking customers to repeat their orders to him over and over until Andrew banishes him solely to brewing orders while he accepts them. Ryan burns his left palm three times, and by the time he’s at home, the pain has dulled to a tolerable throb. 

  


He’s sitting on the couch, idly flipping through episodes of Nailed it! just for something to pass the time, to help the hours trundle along a little faster, because if Shane’s pattern is going to continue, he won’t be home for several more hours. It’s vague and ever-changing but Ryan has come to bet on twelve-thirty for Shane’s return time. 

  


So, he watches Netflix. He makes toast that tastes like cardboard for dinner. He cleans out his nightstand (and tosses an expired bottle of lube and a box of condoms he’d never ended up opening into the trash bin in the kitchen, feeling a dull pang of regret at the mere sight of them). He drinks a beer, he brushes his teeth, he has an obscenely long (and hot) shower that turns his skin red, and when it’s midnight, he can barely sit still. 

  


He confines himself to the couch. He has a clear view of the front door from here, and with the television on and the icy breeze drifting in through the open balcony door on his other side, he can almost distract himself. He bounces his leg upon the tip of his toes as he waits, chewing upon his fingernails as he stares, blankly, into the TV. 

  


Another hour passes. The cold sets in. He’s shivering before long, with goosebumps speckled across his complexion, and only half awake. His hair is still damp from the shower, unable to dry with the cold draft filtering through the apartment, and half-distracted by the episode of _Lucifer_ on in front of him. A strange and hollow feeling settles in upon him, like two cold hands resting heavily upon his shoulders. Something tugs at the very fringes of his consciousness. That cold and empirical feeling comes back, and it has little to do with the open balcony door. 

  


Ryan’s gaze moves toward it, watching the star-speckled sky wink down upon him, while the full moon sits behind a veil of clouds, nestled amidst a silver halo. 

  


The door creaks. 

  


His gaze snaps towards it, and he clambers to his feet at once, straightening up as a too-familiar figure steps inside the apartment, a black silhouette against the golden light thrown by the corridor beyond. 

  


Shane’s hand lingers upon the doorknob as he stands there, shoulders hunched, head ducked, still clad in his work clothes - hair tousled and unbrushed, eyes vacant and almost unseeing, weighted by a faint lilac bruising beneath each one, as if he hasn’t slept (hasn’t fed) in weeks. 

  


His attention moves first to Ryan, and then to the open balcony door. He steps forwards, and pushes the door closed behind him. 

  


“It’s cold in here.” He says, quietly. 

  


“You’re avoiding me.” Ryan counters, pointedly. 

  


“What?” Shane blinks, slowing to a halt in front of the hallway that leads towards their bedrooms, and their shared bathroom. “What are you talking about?”

  


“Did I do something wrong?” Ryan asks, taking a careful and imploring step closer to him. 

  


Shane lingers there, weight shifting from foot to foot, as if he’s conflicted on whether or not to retreat. “I’m not avoiding you. Work has just been-... intense. It’s very distracting, Ryan.”

  


“Was it the bible passages? Is that what did it?” Ryan takes another daring step forwards, lifting his left hand to fold across his chest, to grip idly at the crest of his right shoulder, an anxious, nervous tick he’d developed a long time ago; as if physically trying to shrug off the weight of his uncertainty. 

  


“Ryan-...”

  


“Shane.” 

  


It stops him in his tracks. Ryan says his name plenty; when talking about him to others, when uttering a curt or playful ‘shut up, Shane!’, or when introducing him to someone new, but he never utters it otherwise. Never.

  


The sound of it, unprovoked, unprompted, has something strange and unfamiliar flickering across Shane’s aquiline features. He squeezes his eyes closed. He lifts a hand to rub at the bridge of his nose. He leans heavily against the wall behind him. He tips his head back against it, and exhales loud enough for Ryan to hear.

  


“You’re not-... not feeding, are you?” It sounds ridiculous out loud. 

  


Shane drops his hand. “No.”

  


“Why not?” 

  


“I don’t want to.”

  


Ryan takes another step towards him. “You’ve already kissed me, and then ignored me. Isn’t the pain I’m feeling enough for you?”

  


Shane’s eyes draw, wearily, open. He lifts his head to blink slowly at Ryan, as if struggling just to process his words. 

  


“That’s what you think I’m doing?”

  


“I’ve been thinking about it for days, dude. Ever since it happened. It’s the only logical conclusion I can come to. There isn’t really anything on Google that tells you what to do when a demon kisses you and then acts like you don’t exist.”

  


Shane grimaces at his utterance of the word. He straightens, and he takes two steps forwards; two long and wide steps with his impossibly long legs. He reaches out, fingers splayed, hesitant, halting - pausing just above the crests of Ryan’s shoulders as if uncertain if he should (if he could) touch him. 

  


They settle, gently, upon Ryan’s arms. 

  


“I’m not-... that’s-... I’ve never been in this position before, Ryan.” Shane offers, voice tight. His gaze meets Ryan’s, imploring, deceptively gentle, earnest. “I’ve been with people but I’ve never-... I’ve never-...”

  


“What, dude? It’s me.” Ryan prompts, searching Shane’s pained expression. “I think we’ve established that I’m not gonna exorcise you nor set you on fire.”

  


“If.” Shane starts, voice breathless, scarcely more than a whisper. “_If _I fall in love with you, I won’t burst into flames but my life would be fucked.” 

  


Ryan’s heart misses a beat. A tight knot forms in his stomach. His throat tightens. His eyes burn. Something close to excitement flutters within the cage of his ribs. Something nearing fear settles at the base of his spine. He swallows, gaze unwavering- trying however hard he might to convey to Shane that the thought doesn’t frighten him.

  


Those hands settled upon his upper arms squeeze, pressing into his skin. 

  


“Stop it.” He whispers, hanging his head, closing his eyes tightly, breaking their eye contact. 

  


“What--?”

  


“I can feel you, Ryan. It’s too hard to resist, you’re-...”

  


Another sharp thrill runs through him, sprinting down the steps of his spine, spiraling outwards in a shiver he can’t suppress, spurred on by the admission. 

  


Shane’s grip tightens. 

  


“Fuck.”

  


A halting breath stutters past Ryan’s lips as understanding dawns. Against his better judgement, he reaches out, curling two fingers in the front of Shane’s shirt as if in the hope that it might encourage him, might lift his gaze again. It doesn’t stop, the understanding that Shane is draining him only encourages it. It spreads outwards as he thinks back to the figure outside his door, the silhouette out the window, the blown fuze, and his nightmares. It spirals through him, dizzying and intoxicating and as present as it had been that night over the ouija board. 

  


“Ryan--” Shane’s head lifts, his hands drift forwards, they fumble against the front of Ryan’s t-shirt. They press him sharply back until he stumbles, he fumbles -- he feels his shoulders connect solidly with the wall behind him, two paces away from his bedroom. His breath is pushed past his lips in one gust, and he struggles to gasp in another before Shane is looming over him. 

  


“Stop it. You have to stop it-..” He breathes, cutting himself off the moment his lips meet Ryan’s, messily, open-mouthed, earnest and desperate; hungry.

  


Ryan’s moan is half-lost in the wet press of their lips, slipped somewhere between the seams as Shane’s taste fills his mouth; sweet and ripe and something he can’t discern, only that it is intoxicating and wonderful and it’s making him dizzy.

  


He breaks the kiss, and Ryan’s gasp is so pitiful, so desperate, that he can’t help but feel a small twist of mortification low in his stomach, even as Shane trails a searing line of kisses into the hollow curve of his throat, where his skin is warm and red-flushed from his blush. 

  


“You should be _running _from me.” Shane murmurs, voice muffled, breath swept across the curve of Ryan’s throat. “Why do you want me? I’m not _good.”_

  


“Yes you are.” Ryan shoots back, curling his splayed fingers through the short hair at the nape of Shane’s neck. “If you’re not good, then fucking nobody is, dude.”

  


Shane murmurs something more into his skin, something Ryan doesn’t hear, because his lips part, his teeth skim across his pulse point, and he bites down. All coherent thought seems to escape him at once, his knees threaten to buckle beneath him, warmth and arousal and disbelief flood through him in one symphony of conflicting emotions he’s too relieved, too elated to decipher as Shane presses their bodies flush together.

  


“Fuck-..” Ryan hisses, feeling Shane’s right hand ball into a fist at the base of his sternum, pulling tightly upon his shirt until the fabric bites into the base of his throat and the curves of his shoulders, until it tears and slithers away from his skin in mere ribbons. 

  


“What the fu--?”

  


A hand folds around the base of his spine, pulling him away from the wall, guiding him back and toward the kitchen counter where he’s lifted, pulled close to Shane, and deposited upon the island where they’re eye-level, with Ryan sitting upon its edge and Shane standing, close, between his parted knees -- his shirt in tatters in the middle of the dark hallway. 

  


In the tinny light cast by the glow of the TV, he can see that the circles beneath Shane’s eyes have lessened considerably. 

  


A faint smile touches to the corners of his lips. It’s working, he thinks. 

  


Shane’s eyes drop to his parted lips. He leans in close and claims them again in another kiss that is commanding and sharp and full of teeth and tongue. His palms rove across the curves of Ryan’s chest, mapping the cage of his ribs, the slopes of his hips, the planes of his pectorals and the muscles he’s so artfully cultivated, pausing by the lip of his sweatpants to skim across the telling press of his length, hard and earnest and pressed into the seam. 

  


“Fuck--” He whispers, again; breaking the kiss with abruptness, half-surprised by the spike of pleasure that bolts through him. 

  


The hiss that leaves Shane is equal parts predatory and filled with derisive amusement.

  


It sends another shallow thrill of fear skimming sharply through Ryan, and the hand settled at the base of his spine curls inwards into a small fist. He’d never noticed before, how viscerally, how physically his emotions seem to impact Shane. It feels as if every inch of him is so intrinsically woven in-tune with Ryan. If he’s a conductor, Shane is the entire orchestra, following his every move. 

  


That hand lowers, dipping below the lip of his trousers, thumbing into the elastic band of his boxer-briefs, and offering both a sharp and impatient tug until they slither from the curves of his hips to catch at the bends of his knees. Shane steps back just enough to pull them away, tossing them carelessly aside so that his splayed palms might map out the rest of Ryan’s body, like a topographer marking points on a map-- comprehending every point and terrain. As if, to him, all of it is too breathtaking to forget. His gaze is heavy, pupils blown wide against his irises, heavy with a kind of want that Ryan’s never seen before. 

  


He’s not used to this, to being wanted in such a violent way. 

  


“You don’t know how hard it’s been.” Shane whispers to him, fingers crawling along the tops of his knees, skimming the tops of his thighs, climbing higher and higher towards his length, flushed a pretty pink and resting against his hip, its tip damp with the faintest hint of precum. “..-sharing this space, being so close to you, feeling it all, and not being able to touch you.”

  


“I wanted you to.” Ryan admits, voice tight and small. He hates how he sounds-- as fearful as a child. He swallows, he clears his throat, dropping his voice an octave lower in an effort to be a little more appealing. “So often, I wanted you to.”

  


His lips press into the curve of Ryan’s collarbone, and he swallows back another stuttered moan. He reaches out with unsteady hands to fumble with the buttons on Shane’s shirt, before growing impatient and pulling it open in one swift motion that sends buttons cascading across the living room. Shane, nonplussed, shrugs his shoulders back and strips the shirt away, just as uncaring for where it lands as he had been with the remnants of Ryan’s clothes, as if they are little more than a hindrance, something in the way of what he actually wants. He trails kisses down the curve of Ryan’s chest, down toward the dip of his navel, and then lower, with a palm splayed against Ryan’s sternum to press him back, until he props an elbow against the cold granite counter beneath him just so that he doesn’t have to look away from him. 

  


His breath flutters, warm and tempting, against the curve of Ryan’s length. A sharp thrill of arousal floods through him, and his eyes fall half-lidded. He huffs out a stuttered breath, wanting to beg, to plead for Shane to free him of this strange and new kind of torment they’ve fallen into, but he leans in. He presses his lips into the inside of Ryan’s thigh, where his skin is over-sensitive, unused to being touched. Another shiver quakes through him. His breath catches, and his face floods with warmth as he watches the crown of Shane’s head nestled between his thighs. 

  


“Fuck, dude--”

  


“Stop swearing.” It’s murmured into Ryan’s skin, half-muffled and soon forgotten beneath the tempting press of his tongue, swept along the underside of Ryan’s length.

  


“Fuuuck--!” His head tips back, lips drawn open into a faint, pleasure borne ‘o’ that is kiss-bitten and wanton, and he knows it.

  


He wonders if this, if they, are depraved enough to keep Shane satisfied; if this is shameful, sinful, wrong enough for him to be satisfied by. It’s a question he files away for later, because Shane’s long fingers are curling around the base of his length. His thumb is skimming appreciatively along the flared head of his length, and Ryan’s hips stutter sharply forwards, half-blind with want. 

  


“Shit-.. Dude-... I’m-... fuck. I want you to fuck me. I don’t wanna cum yet-... I w-want-...”

  


Shane draws back, lips flushed and pink and wet with saliva, expression pliant, dark and disbelieving. Just looking at him like this is enough to have Ryan teetering on the edge, and he reaches out to blindly knock Shane’s hand away from the curve of his length.

  


“There’s lube in the bin.”

  


“What?” Shane asks, blinking back his surprise. “Excuse me?”

  


“The bin-... It’s-... it’s like a week away from being expired. It’s fine. There’s nothing else in it. Get it, dude! I’ll change my mind if you don’t move fast.”

  


Shane fumbles, a quiet and disbelieving laugh stuttering past his lips, and ryan suspects he’ll have more questions about this later, but for now, he slips out of the bracket between Ryan’s parted thighs and moves into the kitchen to peel open the cabinet that contains their sorry excuse for a garbage bin. He fishes out the lube, washes it (and his hands) under the faucet while Ryan rolls his eyes, and returns to him in an instant, setting the plastic bottle upon the table. 

  


“I won’t ask.” He murmurs. “But I almost feel like you planned this.”

  


“Absolutely not.” Ryan counters. 

  


“So it isn’t planned? You’re not turning into some kind of incubus who stores his sex toys in the garbage disposal?”

  


“Are you trying to blueball yourself or what, dude?” 

  


Shane grins. He leans in, and he presses a kiss into the corner of Ryan’s lips as he squeezes a generous amount of lube onto the tips of his fingers. He moves in close, setting his free hand against the base of Ryan’s spine to pull him close, until he’s perched upon the very edge of the island. His hand withdraws and presses Ryan’s thighs open wider, before he reaches down, and skims two careful, tempting, cool and slick fingers against his entrance.

  


The feeling is strange, and it’s foreign. Ryan jolts ever so slightly, sucking in a shallow breath while Shane presses another reassuring kiss into the hinge of his jaw. 

  


“Hold still.” He murmurs to him. “It’ll only be uncomfortable for a little bit.”

  


“Shut up.” Ryan murmurs, reaching up to set his hands upon Shane’s shoulders, gripping him tightly just for something to hold on to. 

  


“Don’t be snippy.” Shane murmurs, as the very tip of his index finger sinks inside Ryan. It doesn’t feel painful, simply strange. It twinges, it sinks deeper, curving and flexing inside him in a feeling that’s entirely foreign but not at all unpleasant. “Do you want me to be mean to you?”

  


“..shut up.” Ryan mutters again, a faint wrinkle appearing between his brows as if half-lost, half-focused. 

  


“I’ll take that as a yes.” That finger draws back slowly, and presses back in. Ryan sinks his teeth into the plush curve of his lower lip. He squeezes his eyes shut, he rests his forehead into Shane’s chest where he can hear the temporal and methodical beat of his heart, a reassuring sound that he has come to inexplicably crave. 

  


A second finger soon joins the first, and this one comes with a dull twinge of pain. He swallows back a quiet murmur of discomfort that Shane soothes away with kisses, with encouraging strokes to his length that somehow ensure it never flags. Warmth floods through his frame, settling at the base of his length, and spiraling sharply outwards from where Shane’s fingers rest, nestled inside him. He eases a third in, and it’s there that Ryan hisses. His grip upon Shane’s shoulders tightens, and immediately - his movements cease. His thumb skims across the flushed tip of Ryan’s length, and a full-bodied tremble sweeps through him. 

  


“God-... fuck-...”

  


“Ryan.”

  


“Sorry. Sorry. Sh-Should I start saying ‘Satan’ instead?”

  


Shane huffs out a laugh. 

  


“Or maybe ‘Shane’?”

  


“I’m not a god.”

  


“You might as well be.”

  


Those fingers move, and Ryan bites back another quiet sound of discomfort. They ease, slowly, in and out of him, scissoring, working, gently encouraging him open until the pain begins to ebb away, and a strange and resounding feeling of fullness remains. 

  


They slip out of him, and a quiet and half-strangled sound of protest wrings itself out of him. The quiet ring of a belt buckle being loosened draws Ryan from his thoughts, and he watches, somehow dumbfounded, somehow not - as Shane draws himself free from the waistband of his underwear. He’s big, and given his height that shouldn’t be so surprising. He gives Ryan only a moment to look at him, before he reaches past him again to squeeze more lube onto his spread fingers. He thumbs through it thoughtfully, and reaches down to stroke himself, to coat himself with it until his length gleams in the half-veiled moonlight, cut through by shifting frames from the television still on in the background. 

  


He crowds in close to Ryan, and his half-slick hands lower to curl around the backs of his thighs. He pulls him close in one swift movement, pulling him into his chest, and heaving him off the edge of the island. He moves away from it, and toward the armrest of the couch, where he deposits Ryan so that he fumbles back to fall across the pillows in a laughing heap. 

  


But, Shane moves in over him before he can so much as catch his breath. He pushes Ryan’s thighs apart. He settles between them, he strokes an appreciative palm along the inside of his thigh as if to soothe him before leaning down to claim his lips in a kiss. The lurid and slick sounds of him stroking himself seem to cut through the smooth melody emanating from their sound system until it sounds like a symphony might as well be playing for them, some musical fresco from a Miyazaki film, and when Shane pulls back-- with his silhouette half-illuminated by the moonlight shining in from the balcony, it’s strangely perfect. 

  


His breath catches as Shane draws back, shifting their positions, drawing Ryan close enough that he might guide himself, carefully, toward his entrance. The blunt and flared tip of his length presses for entry, insistent and much, much bigger than just his fingers.

  


“Relax.” He tells Ryan, voice soft. “I know you’re getting off on all of this, but I need you to be calm for this bit, okay?”

  


Ryan nods, fumbling blindly to curl his fingers into a small fist against the edge of the pillow beneath him. 

  


Shane’s hips slowly ease forwards, and Ryan can practically feel himself opening for him. The slow glide of skin-on-skin is as foreign as it is intoxicating. Shane is hot and heavy and wet inside him, he stretches him wide and eases in inch by agonising inch. It hurts, in a dull and omnipotent ache that feels like it crawls through every inch of him, picking at the very fringes of his awareness until he can’t possibly ignore it, even if he’d like to. His eyes feel warm, his cheeks feel hot, and his ragged breaths are harsh and deep.

  


“There.” He feels Shane’s hips nestle against the sway of his backside, warm and earnest. 

  


“Fuck.” Ryan whispers. “Is that part of the deal, being a fucking demon? You get a fucking-... massive cock? If so, sign me the fuck up, man.”

  


Again, Shane laughs. “You’re not doing too bad yourself. But, no. It isn’t, unfortunately.”

  


“Shit.” Ryan huffs. “Don’t move. Just-... not for a second, okay? I can barely breathe.”

  


Shane folds over him, his careful fingers settle beneath the curve of Ryan’s chin, turning his head ever so slightly so that he might slot their lips together once again, in a kiss that’s gentler, softer, milder than all the ones that have preceded it. His lips are pliant and soothing, distracting enough to pull Ryan away from the pain, wonderful enough for him to feel as if they’re in another world entirely, where nothing below their apartment matters at all. 

  


Then, Shane rolls his hips forwards, and Ryan feels it through his whole body. It knocks him breathless, and he breaks the kiss to sink his teeth into the curve of Shane’s shoulder. He hears him draw in a sharp and shallow breath at the feeling, but it doesn’t stop him. His thrusts are shallow, tentative, carefully easing in and out just enough to get Ryan used to the sensation of movement.

  


“You’re doing so good.” He murmurs to him. “..-you feel so fucking good, Ry.”

  


“Better’n you were expecting?” Ryan murmurs into his shoulder. 

  


“So fucking much.” and Shane’s voice is so thick with appreciation, with reverence, with disbelief that Ryan has no choice but to believe him. 

  


He draws back, long fingers curling around the crest of Ryan’s length as his hips ease back, and press forwards, slowly gathering momentum as the last of the pain begins to ebb away, freeing Ryan of its clutches at long last. 

  


His breaths come shallow, disbelieving, still struggling to comprehend that this is real, that he’s here, with Shane, who just so happens to be a demon.

  


His hips rear forwards, jostling Ryan against the couch, sending sharp and lurid sounds of skin-on-skin echoing loudly through their livingroom, cutting through the sweet orchestra playing just for them, and it-- all of it-- sends a strange feeling coursing through Ryan. His nerves feel as if they are standing on-end. Something is pulling taut low in his stomach. Each of Shane’s deep thrusts come with a quiet feeling of withheld urgency that grows more and more dire each time he pressed forwards again. 

  


He’s everywhere, he’s all Ryan can feel, all he can see, and all he can taste. He can feel Shane drinking him in, watching him with wide and hungry eyes as if the mere sight of Ryan beneath him, with his legs spread and his length hot and hard between them, is enough to satisfy him for an eternity. 

  


“You’re amazing.” Shane breathes. “You’re so fucking amazing.”

  


“Fuck--.” Ryan gasps, breath catching at the back of his throat as he reaches out to splay a hand against the concave dip of Shane’s stomach. He fumbles for the curve of his arm, and he pulls him down, sharply, so that he might claim his lips, again.

  


But, Ryan surges forwards, he pushes Shane back, he shifts to maneuver their positions, feeling Shane slip from within him, until he’s sitting down, and Ryan is straddling his parted thighs. He reaches back to grip the base of Shane’s length, to maneuver him back inside. He feels those large hands settle against the curve of his hips, as if to guide him -- as if he needs it.

  


Again, his breath catches, and it feels that much more intimate; being this close to him, being able to look at him, being able to freely touch him. He sinks down upon him, and curls his arms around Shane’s shoulders. He feels him lifting him, guiding him through each thrust until Ryan is riding him, and he can feel Shane’s breathing, shallow and fast-- gaze fixed upon Ryan as if he’s in the midst of some kind of religious experience.

  


“More.” He whispers, voice strangled and choked-off. “More, Shane. Harder.” 

  


One of those hands snakes up to grip at the sway of his waist, Shane’s thumb digs into his flesh, and pulls him down with each stroke, until the flushed tip of his length nudges against that blissful bundle of nerves inside him-- until every thrust feels like a small fireworks display. He sees them against the backs of his eyelids. He sees them in the bottomless black in Shane’s lust-blown gaze. He hears them speckled through the music playing somewhere behind him. Their pace is punishing, and Shane is commanding and domineering-- fucking into him, lifting his hips each time to meet Ryan half-way. 

  


“Fuck, fuck-...” He hisses. “I can’t-... dude, I fucking--”

  


“Come.” Shane tells him, earnest and sharp; an order. “Come for me, Ry. Show me how much you like it.”

  


“Fuck, fuck, fuck--..” His head tips back, his eyes squeeze shut, his nails bite crescent-shaped welts into the curves of Shane’s shoulders as he feels that coil low in his stomach pull tighter and tighter. Pleasure ripples blissfully through him, cresting between his spread thighs, drawing through the base of his stomach, dancing across his veins until his blood feels like it’s on fire. 

  


It’s like this that he reaches his release, coming almost-untouched, with Shane’s fingers wrapped loosely around the base of his length, and his cock still buried deep inside him. His release rushes from him in a vacant mess of white. He spills across the backs of Shane’s fingers, across the curve of his stomach, across the cusp of his own hips. Ryan’s movements falter as he cries out, as his broken sobs are half muffled by Shane’s earnest movements as he’s tipped onto his side, as two big hands manhandle him onto his stomach so that Shane can keep going. His movements are quick and commanding and surprisingly strong. He fucks him through his release, until each thrust feels punishing, pressing into parts of Ryan that are over-sensitive, over-used, until he’s shuddering and shaking beneath him as Shane’s breaths come shallow and halting. His fingers curl into Ryan’s flesh.

  


“Ryan--!” His voice is strangled, strained, harsh- like velvet rubbed the wrong way. Ryan feels it when he reaches his release. It crashes over him with a kind of suddenness he isn’t used to. It floods him with a strange and encompassing kind of warmth that seems to spread outwards, filling the parts of him that Shane’s length can’t reach. His thrusts grow languid and slow, steadily and shallowly fucking into him until he’s spent, until there’s little left to give. 

  


.xx.  


  


They spend the weekend intertwined with one another, tangled up in ways Ryan’s dreamed about for months. Of the time they’ve known one another, he’s gotten to know him slowly. He’s learned how Shane likes his eggs cooked, how he has his coffee, how long it takes for him to shower (and how there’s never any hot water left after he’s done), how long it takes for him to shave, how anal he is about keeping things utterly spotless, how he always makes his bed in the mornings (albeit haphazardly) and how he prefers the temperature to be slightly below average otherwise he’s uncomfortable. He knows what kind of music he likes, what kinds of movies he likes, what TV shows he loves best, his favourite ways to decompress, and his 20-minute sunday afternoon naps that will inevitably ruin his sleeping schedule when he tries to go to sleep in the evenings. 

  


In many ways, Ryan had thought he knew all there was to know about Shane’s likes and dislikes. Here, intertwined with him in rumpled bedsheets, on the bathroom floor, over the granite counter of their kitchen island, and (once) on the balcony of their sky-high apartment, there’s so much more to learn. Shane likes to manhandle. He likes being in charge. He likes biting. He likes marking. He likes it when Ryan is afraid of him. He’s carnal and methodical in everything they do when they are alone together. When Ryan takes charge, Shane requires a firm but reassuring hand. He needs encouragement. He needs kindness. It’s a strange thing to balance, but it’s something Ryan takes great pleasure in learning; it’s like re-reading his favourite book. The lines are all familiar, but there’s something new interwoven into every line, a new perspective, a different ending. 

  


They fuck. A lot. So much that they receive a politely-worded letter from their downstairs neighbour (that both of them had been half-sure was an empty apartment) the first and only sign that others did indeed inhabit this empirical building with them, jutting high into the Heavens. So much that Ryan winces when he sits or stands, that he’s teetering upon the brink of exhaustion each time Shane closes in on him, that even Shane slouches about the apartment with some stiffness to his frame. 

  


It’s over dinner, with a half-full glass of red wine cradled in his long fingers that Shane intrudes upon his thoughts with a vacant frown.

  


“I never apologised.” He observes in a quiet tone. 

  


Ryan looks up from his bowl of pesto, fork poised over his food, brows creased in momentary confusion. “...for what? But late to apologise for bein’ born a dick. I’m learning to take that one in stride, though.” 

  


Shane’s laugh is quiet, appreciative. “No.” He pauses to take a sip of his wine, “..-for lying to you.” 

  


“You didn’t lie.” Ryan rebuffs, spearing one of his mushrooms through with his fork.

  


“I did. For a long time. I lied to you about a lot of things. I manipulated you. I acted every bit like the de-... the thing that I am. I shouldn’t have done that.” He says, clearing his throat as his words catch.

  


“Could you even be honest with me?” Ryan asks, looking up. 

  


“No.” Shane’s response is quiet. 

  


“How could you know I wouldn’t go telling somebody who couldn’t keep their mouth shut? How could you know I wouldn’t bring a priest here to exorcise you? You were being cautious.”

  


“I know.” He sets the wine glass down with an air of finality. “It very nearly drove you away.”

  


Ryan is silent for a moment as he chews. He pushes a stalk of broccoli about the bottom of his bowl. 

  


“I thought you were going to have me exorcised. That day that you brought Father Thomas here, I thought you knew. I thought that was the end. That’s why I got so angry. I’m sorry, Ry. I’m sorry for all of it. There were many points that I wanted to tell you. It-... scared me. I’m the one thing you’re terrified of, the one thing you’re most afraid of in the whole world. I thought that if I told you, you’d run.” He looks up, heavy gaze all but boring into Ryan, awash with affection and immense confusion; as if their situation still puzzles him so. “It’s the smart thing to do.”

  


“I’m not gonna run.” Ryan reassures, tone stern. 

  


“My soul is already damned. I don’t want to take yours with me.” 

  


“You’ve gotta stop saying that, dude. Not even you know what happens after we die.”

  


Shane’s smile is faint, but sincere. He leans forwards, and he extends a hand through the space between them, setting his palm upon the table in front of Ryan. Unthinking, he reaches out to skim the tips of his fingers over the backs of his knuckles. 

  


“You can try to convince me all you want that you’re evil, or that you’re Satan’s number one best boy, but to me; there’s nothing about you that’s bad, big guy. You’re Shane. You’re just-... a bit weird with emotions, and a bit draining to be around sometimes, and you can move things with your eyes if you wanna, and you get off on fear in a really weird way, but I can deal with that. I can deal with all of it. Especially if it means you’re keeping this house and me free of ghosts and other-... Hell-adjacent entities.” Ryan says, skirting around the ‘D’ word that Shane has come to loathe quite so desperately. 

  


A quiet laugh rumbles from him regardless. His hand turns over, and catches Ryan’s fingers in a gentle squeeze. 

  


“I’m sorry, Ryan. I’m sorry for putting you through that. I’m sorry for lying to you. I’ll spend my eternity trying to fix it, even if you say you’ve forgiven me.”

.xx.

  


“I was worried about you.” Andrew admits, twisting the cap back onto an empty carton of full-cream milk they’ve already burned through - and it’s not even midday.

  


Ryan pauses, looking up from the pastry display with an arched brow. “What for?”

  


“You got real distant there for a bit. It reminded me of, um-..” He pauses, frowning as he tosses the empty carton into the trash, reaching down for the handle to the silver fridge under the espresso machine doubtlessly in search of another. “..-something else. I just-... got worried something bad had happened.” 

  


Ryan lingers, understanding settling across his features for he knows what Andrew is choosing to keep unsaid-- It reminded me of how you got when your dad died. 

  


“No. I’m fine. It’s all good, now. Just-... some shit was going on. I had to work through it.”

  


“It was with Shane, right?” he asks, fishing a fresh carton of milk from the little fridge, before straightening and knocking it closed with the toe of his shoe. “Was he being a dick to you?”

  


“No.” Ryan answers, and it’s truthful enough. “I was being a bit of a dick to him, honestly.”

  


“Good.” Andrew murmurs, giving the carton a light shake. “Just, so you know-.. If he hurts you again, tell me. I’ll kick his ass.”

  


Ryan breathes out a dry laugh; deeply amused by the thought of siccing Andrew on Shane at the slightest inconvenience. “I will. Don’t worry.” He pauses, sliding the little plastic door closed on the pastry display. “Y’know, I’ve never said it before, but-... I love you, man. In a totally non-you-pay-my-bills kind of way.”

  


Andrew’s smile is earnest, it’s broad, sunny and barely-contained as he pours a generous amount of milk back into the steamer. “I love you too, dude. In a non-you’re-my-subordinate kind of way.” 

  


.xx.

  


It’s a Friday, and the night is on fire. 

  


The house blazes in a show of technicolour, flashing pinks and blues against worn sandstone over a backdrop of thumping music that beats in tune with Ryan’s heart. The scent of cheap vodka and two-dollar wine hangs heavily in the air. His shoes stick to the glossy floorboards while a stranger in a graduation cap sucks a body shot out of Eugene’s navel, where he’s lying splayed out upon the glass island in the middle of their old, wide kitchen. The same kitchen Ryan had made hung-over pancakes twice a week for years. 

  


As he maneuvers through the crowd, he can’t feel anything but thankful. Thankful that he had moved out. Thankful that he had grown up. Thankful that he had found Shane, who had offered him this ticket to freedom, to another (different) life that didn’t involve strangers in every room of his home. 

  


He pushes outside, two cans of beer in each hand, to greet a blast of cool air. He tips his head back as he breathes it in, glad to be rid of the press of warm bodies, of the overwhelming stench of vodka and whiskey, of the sticky floors and claustrophobic walls illuminated in neon blue and pink.

  


“Ryan!” 

  


The unmistakable sound of Keith calling his name snaps him from his thoughts. He turns his gaze to a small cluster of people standing off to one side of the deck, still half-illuminated by the flashing lights from inside, blazing through the window that separates them. Shane stands beside it, his profile half-illuminated in pink, and half-bathed in shadow, with Ned and Keith alongside him, both gripping the necks of their beers, damp with condensation, and huddled close amidst the cold. 

  


Ryan’s grin is instantaneous. He heads over to them, moving in toward Shane’s side, and wordlessly offering him one of the cans of beer. Shane cracks his open, and shuffles over to curl his arm along the sway of Ryan’s back, palm settled against the cusp of his hip while Ryan fumbles with the opening of his can. 

  


Keith and Ned are silent for a moment. It’s Keith who speaks first.

  


“So, I guess you’re not moving back in, huh?”

  


“Dude.” Ryan looks up while Shane and Ned guffaw with laughter. “I never fucking said I was moving back in.”

  


“I mean. Ryan. I don’t wanna-... seem like I’m hurt or anything like that, but you made a promise.”

  


“No, I didn’t!”

  


“I heard it.” Ned chimes in. “..and you said you never wanted to talk to Shane again in your life and that we should forcefully move you back into the house if we ever catch you talking to him, so-...”

  


“..-so let’s get started once you’re done with your beer, bud! Come on!” Keith steps closer to help Ryan with the opening to his can while Shane laughs.

  


“I never said I was moving back in! You’re twisting my words!” Ryan half-shouts, almost grateful for Keith as he snaps the opening back with ease. “Plus, if that means having to deal with house parties every friday night, I don’t think I could do it again. That was harrowing, man.”

  


“Yeah.” Ned agrees after a moment. “I do think we need to slow down.”

  


“It’s Zach and Eugene.” Keith murmurs, glancing over his shoulder as if to ensure that neither one is within earshot. “Zach said something about wanting to get to know this girl that always comes to them a bit better, but every time we host one, he never has the guts to talk to her.”

  


“Really?” Shane asks, lifting on his toes to look over Ned’s shoulder. “He’s talking to somebody right now.” He lifts his hand to point with two fingers around his beer can to the opposite side of the yard, where Zach lounges on one of the deck chairs in the acre of grass, with a girl nestled within his lap. 

  


“Oh. Fuck me lengthways.” Keith whistles, bewildered. “Love is back in the air.”

  


“Back?” Shane’s brows lift, he sips from his can. 

  


“It died, briefly.” Ned nods, solemn. “But, I’m really glad that you guys patched things up. Not so glad that Ryan is no longer moving in with us again, but, y’know, I’ll live.”

  


“Fucks sake.” Ryan exhales, and shakes his head- feeling suddenly extremely exhausted. They had been here for a handful of hours already. The pleasant buzz at seeing his old friends has rapidly worn off with the pressure of the loud music and alcohol, it has evaporated amidst the press of foreign bodies. Ryan is all too aware of how tired he is in its absence. 

  


“We should probably get going pretty soon, actually.” Shane says, fingers curling within the curve of Ryan’s hip. “It’s been a pretty long night, already.”

  


He turns his head to look up at him. Disbelief washes through his features, and understanding dawns with the realisation that Shane had felt it, felt him. He’d known what Ryan had needed without him needing to utter it aloud. He’d taken the initiative for him. 

  


Warmth floods through him at once. It spirals sharply outwards and fills him from his core. It overtakes him like the rush of a first wave at high tide, and he realises what the feeling is much too late-- because he knows Shane feels it too. 

  


Love.

  


.xx.

  
  


The space between three and six in the afternoon is pink and hazy. When Ryan stands on the balcony of their shared apartment, he feels as though he is a world away from earth, orbiting a separate dimension where he harbours a secret that opens up a door to a thousand preternatural possibilities. It’s a wonderful secret. It’s a powerful secret. It’s a secret that lives inside the walls of this apartment where angels and demons exist and anything is possible. 

  


The space between three and six in the afternoon is lonely. It’s as cold as the midwinter breeze that skims Ryan’s cheeks and turns them pink. Thunder rumbles in the distance while the grey clouds shudder with lightning. Cars weave through the labyrinth of streets far below. Pedestrians and commuters weave through the spaces between like ants marching from one nest to another.

  


The space between three and six in the afternoon is time spent without Shane. It’s time Ryan is left alone in the apartment, time he’s left to overthink, to consider possibilities he hadn’t thought of before, like how cold and empty it feels both inside and out when he is the only one home, like what it means to be in love with a being that isn’t meant to feel that emotion, like how easy it would be to lean too far forwards and fall into this strange city below him, tumbling far away from this pink-tinged apartment where time is linear and rain is constant. Would an angel save him before he meets the asphalt?

  


A warm hand settles at the nape of his neck. Fingers comb through the downy hairs at the notch of his spine. The scent of Shane’s cologne rides on a lambent breeze tinged by the smell of impending rain. Lips press into the curve of Ryan’s throat, drawing him listlessly from his thoughts. He turns his head to see him standing there, still in his work clothes, with his bag sitting by the open balcony door, forgotten in favour of Ryan’s presence as kiss after kiss is pressed to his open lips, and his jutting collarbones. 

  


He wonders if Shane had felt it; how lonely he had been a moment ago. He wonders if he feels how full Ryan feels now, how powerful the mere warmth of his presence could be. He must, for he breaks their kiss, lips pink-flushed and kiss-bitten to peer into Ryan’s eyes, earnest and urgent, as if wanting to drown out the quarrels of his day under the warmth of Ryan’s skin, and the gentleness of his kisses. 

  


“I missed you.” He tells him. Ryan feels his heart miss a beat.

  


Shane’s fingertips trace the line of his jaw back to its hinge. “I love you.” 

  


It feels like he’s in freefall, tumbling through the technicolor city, through the fairy-floss pink clouds, and the sky, striped like ice cream. It feels as if he could grow wings and soar someplace high, but even if he could, he wouldn’t dare. 

  


He leans in to kiss Shane, and it’s deep and it’s passionate. 

  


He doesn’t need a guardian angel. 

  


He has one piece of eternity here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you can forgive me for omitting that one little plot twist! I wanted to keep the surprise (but let me know if it took you off guard or if you saw it coming!). Thank you so much for reading & I really hope you loved this little story! I have a 'things taught by demons' tag over on my tumblr @ needywitch !


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